Firm-level Employment, Labour Market Reforms, and Bank Distress
Moritz Stieglitz, Ralph Setzer
Abstract
We explore the interaction between labour market reforms and financial frictions. Our study combines a new cross-country reform database on labour market reforms with matched firm-bank data for nine euro area countries over the period 1999 to 2013. While we find that labour market reforms are overall effective in increasing employment, restricted access to bank credit can undo up to half of long-term employment gains at the firm-level. Entrepreneurs without sufficient access to credit cannot reap the full benefits of more flexible employment regulation.
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Flight from Safety: How a Change to the Deposit Insurance Limit Affects Households‘ Portfolio Allocation
H. Evren Damar, Reint E. Gropp, Adi Mordel
IWH Discussion Papers,
No. 19,
2019
Abstract
We study how an increase to the deposit insurance limit affects households‘ portfolio allocation by exogenously reducing uninsured deposit balances. Using unique data that identifies insured versus uninsured deposits, along with detailed information on Canadian households‘ portfolio holdings, we show that households respond by drawing down deposits and shifting towards mutual funds and stocks. These outflows amount to 2.8% of outstanding bank deposits. The empirical evidence, consistent with a standard portfolio choice model that is modified to accommodate uninsured deposits, indicates that more generous deposit insurance coverage results in nontrivial adjustments to household portfolios.
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Motivating High‐impact Innovation: Evidence from Managerial Compensation Contracts
Bill Francis, Iftekhar Hasan, Zenu Sharma, Maya Waisman
Financial Markets, Institutions and Instruments,
No. 3,
2019
Abstract
We investigate the relationship between Chief Executive Officer (CEO) compensation and firm innovation and find that long‐term incentives in the form of options, especially unvested options, and protection from managerial termination in the form of golden parachutes are positively related to corporate innovation, and particularly to high‐impact, exploratory (new knowledge creation) invention. Conversely, non‐equity pay has a detrimental effect on the input, output and impact of innovation. Tests using the passage of an option expensing regulation (FAS 123R) as an exogenous shock to option compensation suggest a causal interpretation for the link between long‐term pay incentives, patents and citations. Furthermore, we find that the decline in option pay following the implementation of FAS 123R has led to a significant reduction in exploratory innovation and therefore had a detrimental effect on innovation output. Overall, our findings support the idea that compensation contracts that protect from early project failure and incentivize long‐term commitment are more suitable for inducing high‐impact corporate innovation.
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Firm-level Employment, Labour Market Reforms, and Bank Distress
Ralph Setzer, Moritz Stieglitz
Abstract
We explore the interaction between labour market reforms and financial frictions. Our study combines a new cross-country reform database on labour market reforms with matched firm-bank data for nine euro area countries over the period 1999 to 2013. While we find that labour market reforms are overall effective in increasing employment, restricted access to bank credit can undo up to half of long-term employment gains at the firm-level. Entrepreneurs without sufficient access to credit cannot reap the full benefits of more flexible employment regulation.
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On the Empirics of Reserve Requirements and Economic Growth
Jesús Crespo Cuaresma, Gregor von Schweinitz, Katharina Wendt
Journal of Macroeconomics,
June
2019
Abstract
Reserve requirements, as a tool of macroprudential policy, have been increasingly employed since the outbreak of the great financial crisis. We conduct an analysis of the effect of reserve requirements in tranquil and crisis times on long-run growth rates of GDP per capita and credit (%GDP) making use of Bayesian model averaging methods. Regulation has on average a negative effect on GDP in tranquil times, which is only partly offset by a positive (but not robust effect) in crisis times. Credit over GDP is positively affected by higher requirements in the longer run.
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Delay Determinants of European Banking Union Implementation
Michael Koetter, Thomas Krause, Lena Tonzer
European Journal of Political Economy,
2019
Abstract
Most countries in the European Union (EU) delay the transposition of European Commission (EC) directives, which aim at reforming banking supervision, resolution, and deposit insurance. We compile a systematic overview of these delays to investigate if they result from strategic considerations of governments conditional on the state of their financial, regulatory, and political systems. Transposition delays pertaining to the three Banking Union directives differ considerably across the 28 EU members. Bivariate regression analyses suggest that existing national bank regulation and supervision drive delays the most. Political factors are less relevant. These results are qualitatively insensitive to alternative estimation methods and lag structures. Multivariate analyses highlight that well-stocked deposit insurance schemes speed-up the implementation of capital requirements, banking systems with many banks are slower in implementing new bank rescue and resolution rules, and countries with a more intensive sovereign-bank nexus delay the harmonization of EU deposit insurance more.
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Enforcement of Banking Regulation and the Cost of Borrowing
Yota D. Deli, Manthos D. Delis, Iftekhar Hasan, Liuling Liu
Journal of Banking and Finance,
April
2019
Abstract
We show that borrowing firms benefit substantially from important enforcement actions issued on U.S. banks for safety and soundness reasons. Using hand-collected data on such actions from the main three U.S. regulators and syndicated loan deals over the years 1997–2014, we find that enforcement actions decrease the total cost of borrowing by approximately 22 basis points (or $4.6 million interest for the average loan). We attribute our finding to a competition-reputation effect that works over and above the lower risk of punished banks post-enforcement and survives in a number of sensitivity tests. We also find that this effect persists for approximately four years post-enforcement.
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Drivers of Systemic Risk: Do National and European Perspectives Differ?
Claudia M. Buch, Thomas Krause, Lena Tonzer
Journal of International Money and Finance,
March
2019
Abstract
With the establishment of the Banking Union, the European Central Bank has been granted the power to impose stricter regulations than the national regulator if systemic risks are not adequately addressed at the national level. We ask whether there is a cross-border externality in the sense that a bank’s systemic risk differs when applying a national versus a European perspective. On average, banks’ contribution to systemic risk is similar at the two regional levels, and so is the ranking of banks. Generally, larger banks and banks with a lower share of loans are more systemically important. The effects of these variables are qualitatively but not quantitatively similar at the national versus the European level.
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Benign Neglect of Covenant Violations: Blissful Banking or Ignorant Monitoring?
Stefano Colonnello, Michael Koetter, Moritz Stieglitz
Abstract
Theoretically, bank‘s loan monitoring activity hinges critically on its capitalisation. To proxy for monitoring intensity, we use changes in borrowers‘ investment following loan covenant violations, when creditors can intervene in the governance of the firm. Exploiting granular bank-firm relationships observed in the syndicated loan market, we document substantial heterogeneity in monitoring across banks and through time. Better capitalised banks are more lenient monitors that intervene less with covenant violators. Importantly, this hands-off approach is associated with improved borrowers‘ performance. Beyond enhancing financial resilience, regulation that requires banks to hold more capital may thus also mitigate the tightening of credit terms when firms experience shocks.
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Banks Response to Higher Capital Requirements: Evidence from a Quasi-natural Experiment
Reint E. Gropp, Thomas Mosk, Steven Ongena, Carlo Wix
Review of Financial Studies,
No. 1,
2019
Abstract
We study the impact of higher capital requirements on banks’ balance sheets and their transmission to the real economy. The 2011 EBA capital exercise is an almost ideal quasi-natural experiment to identify this impact with a difference-in-differences matching estimator. We find that treated banks increase their capital ratios by reducing their risk-weighted assets, not by raising their levels of equity, consistent with debt overhang. Banks reduce lending to corporate and retail customers, resulting in lower asset, investment, and sales growth for firms obtaining a larger share of their bank credit from the treated banks.
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