Drivers of Systemic Risk: Do National and European Perspectives Differ?
Claudia M. Buch, Thomas Krause, Lena Tonzer
Abstract
In Europe, the financial stability mandate generally rests at the national level. But there is an important exception. Since the establishment of the Banking Union in 2014, the European Central Bank (ECB) can impose stricter regulations than the national regulator. The precondition is that the ECB identifies systemic risks which are not adequately addressed by the macroprudential regulator at the national level. In this paper, we ask whether the drivers of systemic risk differ when applying a national versus a European perspective. We use market data for 80 listed euro-area banks to measure each bank’s contribution to systemic risk (SRISK) at the national and the euro-area level. Our research delivers three main findings. First, on average, systemic risk increased during the financial crisis. The difference between systemic risk at the national and the euro-area level is not very large, but there is considerable heterogeneity across countries and banks. Second, an exploration of the drivers of systemic risk shows that a bank’s contribution to systemic risk is positively related to its size and profitability. It decreases in a bank’s share of loans to total assets. Third, the qualitative determinants of systemic risk are similar at the national and euro-area level, whereas the quantitative importance of some determinants differs.
Read article
05.01.2017 • 3/2017
Secretariat for research network CompNet gets new home at IWH
The Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH) – Member of the Leibniz Association is pleased to announce that it will be hosting the Secretariat for the Competitiveness Research Network (CompNet), an international network of scholars and practitioners, who share interest for top-notch research and policy analysis on competitiveness and productivity.
Read
A Review of Empirical Research on the Design and Impact of Regulation in the Banking Sector
Sanja Jakovljević, Hans Degryse, Steven Ongena
Annual Review of Financial Economics,
2015
Abstract
We review existing empirical research on the design and impact of regulation in the banking sector. The impact of each individual piece of regulation may inexorably depend on the set of regulations already in place, the characteristics of the banks involved (from their size or ownership structure to operational idiosyncrasies in terms of capitalization levels or risk-taking behavior), and the institutional development of the country where the regulation is introduced. This complexity is challenging for the econometrician, who relies either on single-country data to identify challenges for regulation or on cross-country data to assess the overall effects of regulation. It is also troubling for the policy maker, who has to optimally design regulation to avoid any unintended consequences, especially those that vary over the credit cycle such as the currently developing macroprudential frameworks.
Read article
Bank Market Power, Factor Reallocation, and Aggregate Growth
R. Inklaar, Michael Koetter, Felix Noth
Journal of Financial Stability,
2015
Abstract
Using a unique firm-level sample of approximately 700,000 firm-year observations of German small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), this study seeks to identify the effect of bank market power on aggregate growth components. We test for a pre-crisis sample whether bank market power spurs or hinders the reallocation of resources across informationally opaque firms. Identification relies on the dependence on external finance in each industry and the regional demarcation of regional banking markets in Germany. The results show that bank markups spur aggregate SME growth, primarily through technical change and the reallocation of resources. Banks seem to need sufficient markups to generate the necessary private information to allocate financial funds efficiently.
Read article
Switching to Exchange Rate Flexibility? The Case of Central and Eastern European Inflation Targeters
Andrej Drygalla
FIW Working Paper,
No. 139,
2015
Abstract
This paper analyzes changes in the monetary policy in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland following the policy shift from exchange rate targeting to inflation targeting around the turn of the millennium. Applying a Markovswitching dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model, switches in the policy parameters and the volatilities of shocks hitting the economies are estimated and quantified. Results indicate the presence of regimes of weak and strong responses of the central banks to exchange rate movements as well as periods of high and low volatility. Whereas all three economies switched to a less volatile regime over time, findings on changes in the policy parameters reveal a lower reaction to exchange rate movements in the Czech Republic and Poland, but an increased attention to it in Hungary. Simulations for the Czech Republic and Poland also suggest their respective central banks, rather than a sound macroeconomic environment, being accountable for reducing volatility in variables like inflation and output. In Hungary, their favorable developments can be attributed to a larger extent to the reduction in the size of external disturbances.
Read article
Taxes, Banks and Financial Stability
Reint E. Gropp
R. de Mooij and G. Nicodème (eds), Taxation and Regulation of the Financial Sector. MIT Press,
2014
Abstract
In response to the financial crisis of 2008/2009, numerous new taxes on financial institutions have been discussed or implemented around the world. This paper discusses the connection between the incidence of the taxes, their incentive effects, and policy makers’ objectives. Combining basic insights from banking theory with standard models of tax incidence shows that the incidence of such taxes will disproportionately fall on small and medium size enterprises. The arguments presented suggest it is unlikely that the taxes will have a beneficial impact on financial stability or raise significant amounts of revenue without increasing the cost of capital to bank dependent firms significantly.
Read article
Spillover Effects among Financial Institutions: A State-dependent Sensitivity Value-at-Risk Approach
Z. Adams, R. Füss, Reint E. Gropp
Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis,
No. 3,
2014
Abstract
In this paper, we develop a state-dependent sensitivity value-at-risk (SDSVaR) approach that enables us to quantify the direction, size, and duration of risk spillovers among financial institutions as a function of the state of financial markets (tranquil, normal, and volatile). For four sets of major financial institutions (commercial banks, investment banks, hedge funds, and insurance companies) we show that while small during normal times, equivalent shocks lead to considerable spillover effects in volatile market periods. Commercial banks and, especially, hedge funds appear to play a major role in the transmission of shocks to other financial institutions.
Read article
Macroeconomic Factors and Microlevel Bank Behavior
Claudia M. Buch, S. Eickmeier, Esteban Prieto
Journal of Money, Credit and Banking,
No. 4,
2014
Abstract
We analyze the link between banks and the macroeconomy using a model that extends a macroeconomic VAR for the U.S. with a set of factors summarizing conditions in about 1,500 commercial banks. We investigate how macroeconomic shocks are transmitted to individual banks and obtain the following main findings. Backward-looking risk of a representative bank declines, and bank lending increases following expansionary shocks. Forward-looking risk increases following an expansionary monetary policy shock. There is, however, substantial heterogeneity in the transmission of macroeconomic shocks, which is due to bank size, capitalization, liquidity, risk, and the exposure to real estate and consumer loans.
Read article
Sovereign Credit Risk, Banks' Government Support, and Bank Stock Returns around the World: Discussion of Correa, Lee, Sapriza, and Suarez
Reint E. Gropp
Journal of Money, Credit and Banking,
s1
2014
Abstract
In the years leading up to the 2008–09 financial crisis, many banks around the world greatly expanded their balance sheets to take advantage of cheap and abundantly available funding. Access to international funding markets, in particular, made it possible for banks to reach a size that in some cases was a large multiple of their home countries’ gross domestic product (GDP). In Iceland, for example, assets of the banking system reached up to 900% of GDP in 2007. Similarly, by the end of 2008, assets in UK and Swiss banks exceeded 500% of their countries’ GDPs, respectively. Banks may also have grown rapidly because they may have wanted to reach too-big-to-fail status in their country, implying even lower funding cost (Penas and Unal 2004).
The depth and severity of the 2008–09 financial crisis and the subsequent debt crisis in Europe, however, have cast doubts on the ability of governments to bail out banks when they experience severe difficulties, in particular, in financially fragile environments and faced with large budget imbalances. This has resulted in as what some observers have dubbed a “doom loop”: the combination of weak public finances and weak banks results in a vicious cycle, in which the funding cost of banks increases, as the ability of governments to bail out banks is called into question, in turn increasing the funding cost of these banks and making the likelihood that the government will actually have to step in even higher, which in turn increases funding cost to the government and so forth.
Against this background, the paper by Correa et al. (2014) explores the link between sovereign rating changes and bank stock returns. They show large negative reactions of stock returns in response to sovereign ratings downgrades for banks that are expected to receive government support in case of failure. They find the strongest effects in developed economies, where the credibility of government bail outs is higher ex ante, while the effects are smaller in developing and emerging economies. In my view, the paper makes a number of important contributions to the extant literature.
Read article
Granularity in Banking and Growth: Does Financial Openness Matter?
Franziska Bremus, Claudia M. Buch
IWH Discussion Papers,
No. 14,
2013
Abstract
We explore the impact of large banks and of financial openness for aggregate growth. Large banks matter because of granular effects: if markets are very concentrated in terms of the size distribution of banks, idiosyncratic shocks at the bank-level do not cancel out in the aggregate but can affect macroeconomic outcomes. Financial openness may affect GDP growth in and of itself, and it may also influence concentration in banking and thus the impact of bank-specific shocks for the aggregate economy. To test these relationships, we use different measures of de jure and de facto financial openness in a linked micro-macro panel dataset. Our research has three main findings: First, bank-level shocks significantly impact on GDP. Second, financial openness lowers GDP growth. Third, granular effects tend to be stronger in financially closed economies.
Read article
