Search Results
Showing results 1 to 10 of approximately 25.
(refine search)
Working Paper
Foreign competition and banking industry dynamics: an application to Mexico
The authors develop a simple general equilibrium framework to study the effects of global competition on banking industry dynamics and welfare. They apply the framework to the Mexican banking industry, which underwent a major structural change in the 1990s as a consequence of both government policy and external shocks. Given the high concentration in the Mexican banking industry, domestic and foreign banks act strategically in the authors? framework. After calibrating the model to Mexican data, the authors examine the welfare consequences of government policies that promote global ...
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 ...
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 ...
Discussion Paper
How Has the Business of International Banking Changed?
In this post, I focus on the broad historical progression of international banking activity. This broad progression serves as a backdrop for a range of other discussions and posts on global banking, on issues such as foreign banking organizations’ use of liquidity facilities in the United States and the role of banks in international risk-sharing and international transmission of shocks. It also helps explain the policy regimes in place through recent financial crises and even some of the data gaps that regulators and researchers have encountered.
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 ...
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 ...
Discussion Paper
Will Capital Flows through Global Banks Support Economic Recovery?
While policymakers around the world have aggressively and swiftly reacted to the common negative economic shock from COVID-19, the timing and forms of policy responses in the economic recovery stage may be more geographically differentiated. The range in policy responses, along with variations in the financial health of banks, likely will affect the flow of international credit through global banks. In this post, we ask whether, based on historical precedent, global banks are likely to provide additional support to the economic recovery in the locations they serve.
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
What Determines the Composition of International Bank Flows?
This paper studies how frictions to foreign bank operations affect the sectoral composition of banks? foreign positions, their funding sources and international bank flows. It presents a parsimonious model of banking across borders, which is matched to bank-level data and used to quantify cross-border frictions. The counterfactual analysis shows how higher barriers to foreign bank entry alter the composition of international bank flows and may reverse the direction of net interbank flows. It also highlights that interbank lending and lending to non-banking firms respond differently to changes ...
Report
Complexity in large U.S. banks
While both size and complexity are important for the largest U.S. bank holding companies (BHCs), specific types of complexity and their patterns across banks are not well understood. We introduce a range of measures of organizational, business, and geographic complexity. Comparing 2007 with 2017, we show that large U.S. BHCs remain very complex, with some declines along organizational and geographical complexity dimensions. The numbers of legal entities within some large BHCs have fallen. By contrast, the multiple industries spanned by legal entities within the BHCs have shifted more than ...