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Working Paper
No Guarantees, No Trade: How Banks Affect Export Patterns
How relevant are financial instruments to manage risk in international trade for exporting? Employing a unique dataset of U.S. banks' trade finance claims by country, this paper estimates the effect of shocks to the supply of letters of credit on U.S. exports. We show that a one-standard deviation negative shock to a country's supply of letters of credit reduces U.S. exports to that country by 1.5 percentage points. This effect is stronger for smaller and poorer destinations. It more than doubles during crisis times, suggesting a non-negligible role for finance in explaining the Great Trade ...
Report
Bank Complexity, Governance, and Risk
Bank holding companies (BHCs) can be complex organizations, conducting multiple lines of business through many distinct legal entities and across a range of geographies. While such complexity raises the costs of bank resolution when organizations fail, the effect of complexity on BHCs’ broader risk profiles is less well understood. Business, organizational, and geographic complexity can engender explicit trade-offs between the agency problems that increase risk and the diversification, liquidity management, and synergy improvements that reduce risk. The outcomes of such trade-offs may ...
Discussion Paper
Follow That Money! How Global Banks Manage Liquidity Globally
Banks increasingly move money around the world. Over the last thirty years, gross international claims of banks from all countries have grown ten-fold, reaching a peak of about $25 trillion in 2007 (see chart below). Such global banking flows have been much in the news recently, sometimes depicted as a key culprit of the transmission around the globe of the shocks following the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, and more recently the European sovereign debt crisis. The discourse in the regulatory arena seems to share this sentiment, with a bias towards curbing some of the global banking activity ...
Discussion Paper
Did Subsidies to Too-Big-To-Fail Banks Increase during the COVID-19 Pandemic?
Once a bank grows beyond a certain size or becomes too complex and interconnected, investors often perceive that it is “too big to fail” (TBTF), meaning that if the bank were to become distressed, the government would likely bail it out. In a recent post, I showed that the implicit funding subsidies to systemically important banks (SIBs) declined, on average, after a set of reforms for eliminating TBTF perceptions was implemented. In this post, I discuss whether these subsidies increased again during the COVID-19 pandemic and, if so, whether the increase accrued to large firms in all ...
Working Paper
Bank Complexity, Governance, and Risk
Bank holding companies (BHCs) can be complex organizations, conducting multiple lines of business through many distinct legal entities and across a range of geographies. While such complexity raises the the costs of bank resolution when organizations fail, the effect of complexity on BHCs' broader risk profiles is less well understood. Business, organizational, and geographic complexity can engender explicit trade-offs between the agency problems that increase risk and the diversification, liquidity management, and synergy improvements that reduce risk. The outcomes of such trade-offs may ...
Report
A Neoclassical Model of the World Financial Cycle
Emerging markets face large and persistent fluctuations in sovereign spreads. To what extent are these fluctuations driven by local shocks versus financial conditions in advanced economies? To answer this question, we develop a neoclassical business cycle model of a world economy with an advanced country, the North, and many emerging market economies, the South. Northern households invest in domestic stocks, domestic defaultable bonds, and international sovereign debt. Over the 2008-2016 period, the global cycle phase, the North accounts for 68% of Southern spreads’ fluctuations. Over the ...
Working Paper
A Neoclassical Model of the World Financial Cycle
Emerging markets face large and persistent fluctuations in sovereign spreads. To what extent are these fluctuations driven by local shocks versus financial conditions in advanced economies? To answer this question, we develop a neoclassical business cycle model of a world economy with an advanced country, the North, and many emerging market economies, the South. Northern households invest in domestic stocks, domestic defaultable bonds, and international sovereign debt. Over the 2008-2016 period, the global cycle phase, the North accounts for 68% of Southern spreads' fluctuations. Over the ...
Working Paper
U.S. Banks and Global Liquidity
We characterize how U.S. global systemically important banks (GSIBs) supply short-term dollar liquidity in repo and foreign exchange swap markets in the post-Global Financial Crisis regulatory environment and serve as the "lenders-of-second-to-last-resort". Using daily supervisory bank balance sheet information, we find that U.S. GSIBs modestly increase their dollar liquidity provision in response to dollar funding shortages, particularly at period-ends, when the U.S. Treasury General Account balance increases, and during the balance sheet taper of the Federal Reserve. The increase in the ...
Journal Article
Measures of global bank complexity
Size and complexity are customarily viewed as contributing to the too-big-to-fail status of financial institutions. Yet there is no standard accepted metric for the complexity of a ?typical? financial firm, much less for a large firm engaged in global finance. This article provides perspective on the issue of complexity by examining the number, types, and geographical spread of global financial institutions? affiliates. The authors show that standard measures of institution size are strongly related to total counts of affiliates in an organization, but are more weakly aligned with other ...
Journal Article
Complexity in Large U.S. Banks
The structural complexity of the largest U.S. bank holding companies (BHCs) has been changing. Following the global financial crisis, the simplification of bank complexity was a policy priority. Using a variety of measures of organizational, business, and geographic complexity, the authors show that large U.S. BHCs nonetheless remain very complex. Organizational complexity has declined, as the average number of legal entities within large U.S. BHCs has fallen. By contrast, the range of industries spanned by legal entities within the BHCs has shifted more than it has declined, especially ...