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Report
What determines the composition of international bank flows?
Several recent studies document that the extent to which banks transmit shocks across borders depends on the type of foreign activities these banks engage in. This paper proposes a model to explain the composition of banks? foreign activities, distinguishing between international interbank lending, intrabank lending, and cross-border lending to foreign firms. The model shows that the different activities are jointly determined and depend on the efficiencies of countries? banking sectors, differences in the return on loans across countries, and impediments to foreign bank operations. ...
Speech
Reform in a time of rapid change
Remarks at the Standard and Poor's Ratings Services Global Bank Conference, New York City
Report
No guarantees, no trade: how banks affect export patterns
This study provides evidence that shocks to the supply of trade finance have a causal effect on U.S. exports. The identification strategy exploits variation in the importance of banks as providers of letters of credit across countries. The larger a U.S. bank?s share of the trade finance market in a country, the larger should be the effect on exports to that country if the bank changes its supply of letters of credit. We find that a shock of one standard deviation to a country?s supply of letters of credit increases export growth, on average, by 1.5 percentage points. The effect is larger for ...
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 ...
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 ...
Discussion Paper
Did Too-Big-To-Fail Reforms Work Globally?
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 fail, the government would likely bail it out. Following the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2008, the G20 countries agreed on a set of reforms to eliminate the perception of TBTF, as part of a broader package to enhance financial stability. In June 2020, the Financial Stability Board (FSB), a sixty-eight-member international advisory body set up in 2009, published the results of a year-long evaluation of the ...
Working Paper
The pricing of FX forward contracts: micro evidence from banks’ dollar hedging
We use transaction-level data on foreign exchange (FX) forward contracts for the period 2014 through 2016 in conjunction with supervisory balance sheet information to study the drivers of banks? dollar hedging costs. Comparing contracts of the same maturity that are initiated during the same hour of the same day, we find large heterogeneity in banks? hedging costs. We show that these costs (i) are higher for banks with a larger FX funding gap, (ii) depend on banks? FX funding composition in terms of the source (interbank versus retail) and rollover structure (long-term versus short-term), ...
Working Paper
What are the consequences of global banking for the international transmission of shocks?: a quantitative analysis
The global financial crisis of 2008 was followed by a wave of regulatory reforms that affected large banks, especially those with a global presence. These reforms were reactive to the crisis. In this paper we propose a structural model of global banking that can be used proactively to perform counterfactual analysis on the effects of alternative regulatory policies. The structure of the model mimics the US regulatory framework and highlights the organizational choices that banks face when entering a foreign market: branching versus subsidiarization. When calibrated to match moments from a ...
Working Paper
Monetary policy and global banking
Global banks use their global balance sheets to respond to local monetary policy. However, sources and uses of funds are often denominated in different currencies. This leads to a foreign exchange (FX) exposure that banks need to hedge. If cross?currency flows are large, the hedging cost increases, diminishing the return on lending in foreign currency. We show that, in response to domestic monetary policy easing, global banks increase their foreign reserves in currency areas with the highest interest rate, while decreasing lending in these markets. We also find an increase in FX hedging ...
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 ...