Search Results
Working Paper
Stressed Banks? Evidence from the Largest-Ever Supervisory Review
We study short-term and medium-term changes in bank risk-taking as a result of supervision, and the associated real effects. For identification, we exploit the European Central Bank's asset-quality review (AQR) in conjunction with security and credit registers. After the AQR announcement, reviewed banks reduce riskier securities and credit supply, with the greatest effect on riskiest securities. We find negative spillovers on asset prices and firm-level credit availability. Moreover, non-banks with higher exposure to reviewed banks acquire the shed risk. After the AQR compliance, reviewed ...
Working Paper
Foreign Investment, Regulatory Arbitrage, and the Risk of U.S. Banking Organizations
This study investigates the implications of cross-country differences in banking regulation and supervision for the international subsidiary locations and risk of U.S. bank holding companies (BHCs). We find that U.S. BHCs are more likely to operate subsidiaries in countries with weaker regulation and supervision and that such location decisions are associated with elevated BHC risk and higher contribution to systemic risk. The quality of BHCs? internal controls and risk management play an important role in these location choices and risk outcomes. Overall, our study suggests that U.S. banking ...
Speech
Testimony on Exploring Financial Risks on Banking Posed by Climate Change
Testimony before the New York State Senate Committees on Banks, Finance, and Environmental Conservation (delivered via videoconference).
Report
Macroprudential policy and the revolving door of risk: lessons from leveraged lending guidance
We investigate the U.S. experience with macroprudential policies by studying the interagency guidance on leveraged lending. We find that the guidance primarily impacted large, closely supervised banks, but only after supervisors issued important clarifications. It also triggered a migration of leveraged lending to nonbanks. While we do not find that nonbanks had more lax lending policies than banks, we unveil important evidence that nonbanks increased bank borrowing following the issuance of guidance, possibly to finance their growing leveraged lending. The guidance was effective at reducing ...
Report
Bank Supervision
We provide a critical review of the empirical and theoretical literature on bank supervision. The review focuses on microprudential supervision: the supervision of individual banking institutions aimed at assessing the financial and operational health of those firms. Theory suggests that supervision is required both to ensure compliance with regulation but also to allow for the use of soft information in mitigating externalities of bank failure. Empirically, more intensive supervision results in reduced risk-taking, but there is less consensus on whether the risk-reducing impact of ...
Working Paper
Embedded Supervision: How to Build Regulation into Blockchain Finance
The spread of distributed ledger technology (DLT) in finance could help to improve the efficiency and quality of supervision. This paper makes the case for embedded supervision, i.e., a regulatory framework that provides for compliance in tokenized markets to be automatically monitored by reading the market?s ledger, thus reducing the need for firms to actively collect, verify and deliver data. After sketching out a design for such schemes, the paper explores the conditions under which distributed ledger data might be used to monitor compliance. To this end, a decentralized market is modelled ...
Speech
A Microprudential Perspective on the Financial Risks of Climate Change
Remarks at the 2020 Climate Risk Symposium, Global Association of Risk Professionals (delivered via videoconference).
Working Paper
Credit Ratings, Private Information, and Bank Monitoring Ability
In this paper, we use credit rating data from two large Swedish banks to elicit evidence on banks' loan monitoring ability. For these banks, our tests reveal that banks' internal credit ratings indeed include valuable private information from monitoring, as theory suggests. Banks' private information increases with the size of loans.