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This thesis aims to advance our understanding of banking in the post-crisis era. It makes three distinct contributions to the literature on banking. The first chapter examines whether "too-big-to-fail" (TBTF) factors affect estimates of scale economies for large banks. Based on a standard model of bank production that does not control for any TBTF factors, we find evidence of scale economies for our sample of large banks. However, once we control for TBTF factors, we instead find evidence of constant returns to scale. These results suggest that estimates of scale economies for large banks are affected by TBTF factors. The second chapter examines the impact of forbearance lending on firm dynamics and performance in Europe since the sovereign debt crisis. We develop a quantitative model, which features endogenous forbearance lending and endogenous firm defaults, as well as information asymmetry faced by the lender. We fit the model to key Euro Area firm statistics over the period 2011 to 2014. We show that in the absence of forbearance lending, the average firm sales growth, investment and productivity are higher than in the benchmark scenario with forbearance lending. These results suggest that forbearance lending practices have contributed to the recent economic stagnation across the Euro Area. The third chapter introduces a novel way to identify the causal effect of bank capital on risk-taking. We use provisions for misconduct issues as an instrument for bank capital. We show that misconduct provisions are an appropriate instrument due to their strong and negative impact on bank capital, and are otherwise unrelated to asset risk-taking. Our main finding is subsequently that a negative shock to bank capital leads to an increase in risk-taking, as measured by detailed information on mortgage underwriting standards.

The present thesis examines the implications of ownership and institutions for corporate financing in Central and Eastern Europe. There are three empirical chapters (chapters 2, 3 and 4). Chapter two examines the role of business networks for firm external financing. Our central hypothesis here is that firms’ affiliation to business association is likely to be beneficial in securing external finance (especially bank finance) in countries with weak legal and judicial institutions, as it helps banks and financial institutions to minimize the underlying agency costs of lending. Using recent EBRD-World Bank BEEPS data, we find some support to this central hypothesis in our sample. Importance of foreign banks for economic development of CEE countries has been emphasized in the literature though there is wide dispersion in foreign investment in the region. In this context, chapter three (i.e., the second empirical chapter) focuses on the implications of corruption for foreign bank entry and ownership structure in Central and Eastern European countries. The chapter argues that the presence and persistence of corruption (both absolute and relative) may adversely affect costs of setting up as well as running day-to-day operations of foreign banks in host emerging economies. Using primarily Bankscope bank-level data we find that greater absolute and relative corruption may lower foreign bank entry, greater relative corruption may encourage foreign greenfield entry in our sample; while relative corruption is not significant for foreign takeover. The latter highlights the importance of encouraging foreign investors from countries with similar institutions. Finally, considering the implications of ownership for bank capital and performance in chapter four (the final empirical chapter) in light of the focus on bank capital and capital regulation in discussions after the recent banking crisis, we argue that the relationship between bank capital and bank performance crucially depends on bank ownership structure. Using Osiris data we examine foreign greenfield and other joint venture (JV) differential effect of high bank capital on bank performance. A significant positive effect of foreign Greenfield (as opposed to JV) bank capital on bank performance, after controlling for all other factors is found. We attribute this to better governance compared to varied ownership arrangement in other joint venture banks. Thus wide dispersion in the quality of institutions and ownership explains a great deal of variation in the economic performance of countries in the region. We hope findings of this thesis would inform policies and will also influence future research.

Credit risk is treated as a major risk in banks and has become more important with the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent regulatory controls, mainly in the form of new changes in Basel II and the proposed Basel III requirements. The use of credit risk models grew in the 2000s due to both the use of internal models in Basel II as well as bank use for economic capital calculations. These models have a large and growing influence on how credit risks are managed, yet there is a gap in the current literature on how these models are used in practice. This research explores their use in banks to help provide academic and management insight into the actual use of credit risk models. An interpretative approach using qualitative case study was undertaken in three banks using face-to-face interviews with the key credit risk managers that worked in the methodology, decision making, monitoring, control and reporting areas. While interviews were the main source of data for the research, it was supported by observation and a review of documentation that related to the use of credit risk models in the bank. The research findings show the merits in examining the social, organisational and cultural constructions as well as the role of individuals in this process. This evidences the usefulness of interpretive research, which thrives on diversity of meanings as opposed to comparing just the technical aspects of the models as found in more traditional studies. This research provides a contribution to the academic understanding of the use of credit risk models not found in any of the studies to date. This includes new insights into the use of qualitative information, the use of expert judgement (including an element of gut feel), how model complexity can detract from model use and the importance of aligning models to the risk appetite of the bank. These findings are significant both from an academic and practitioner aspect as they open up commonly-hidden processes on how these models are used in practice.

L'ampleur sans précédent de la crise financière de 2007-2008 a donné naissance à une vaste littérature dévolue à l'analyse du phénomène du Shadow Banking, considéré comme le principal responsable de la débâcle bancaire et financière de la Grande Récession, sans pour autant apporter une compréhension globale. L’objectif de cette thèse est, à l’aide d’une approche positive, d’étudier les racines et effectuer une dissection du Shadow Banking, indispensable pour cerner sa complexité, en établir une compréhension globale et comprendre son rôle central dans le financement de l’économie et la création monétaire. Avant d’être normative, cette étude nécessite surtout une démarche positive qui doit présenter des faits et des mécanismes d’un point de vue analytique. Pour cela, ce travail contribue à la littérature existante en proposant une démarche progressive exposant les outils de la migration supposée des risques bancaires en dehors du bilan des banques et démêlant le vrai du fantasme dans une lecture approfondie des enjeux du Shadow Banking. Dans cette logique, le premier chapitre de ce travail de thèse s’est porté sur ce qui semblait être à l’origine de la crise de 2007-2008, à savoir la circulation des actifs et des risques des banques au travers de la vente de crédits bancaires. Il y est établi que le transfert d’actifs bancaires dans sa forme moderne est une réalité depuis plus de quarante ans, fragilisant l’hypothèse d’un phénomène récent coupable du péché originel menant à la crise, ce fardeau semblant dévolu à la titrisation. Le second chapitre de ce travail de thèse est ainsi consacré à l’étude de la titrisation et plus particulièrement de ses origines et de ses mécanismes. A l’image de la vente de crédit, l’hypothèse d’un phénomène récent est vite écartée par la riche et longue histoire du processus de titrisation qui s’étend sur plus de quatre siècles. A l’opposé d’un phénomène balbutiant et uniquement américain, la titrisation révèle des racines européennes et anciennes loin d’être dénuées d’une certaine instabilité. En revanche, il est avéré que la forme moderne de la titrisation doit son schéma au secteur public américain qui a, par son choix de privilégier les engagements sur la détention des actifs, entretenu le mirage d’une bénédiction de Midas sensé permettre de créer de la qualité ex-nihilo. Si cette fable est loin d’être soutenable, il n’en reste pas moins que la titrisation peut être un processus vertueux de répartition de qualité et de rendement rendu possible par la diminution des asymétries d’information, accompagné d’une amélioration sensible de la liquidité du financement. Cependant, elle n’en reste pas moins le support préférentiel des arbitrages réglementaires bancaires permis par l’attentisme des régulateurs. Enfin, à la lumière de ces éclairages nécessaires sur les outils de la finance moderne, le troisième chapitre de ce travail de thèse se consacre à l’étude du Shadow Banking. Après en avoir exposé et dénoncé les poncifs, il offre une lecture du phénomène qui dépasse le simple fantasme d’un système bancaire parallèle caché dans les ombres en proposant une lecture qui mène progressivement à s’interroger sur le basculement du système financier vers une dynamique de collatéralisation intensive. Cette multiplication des assurances trouve alors son paroxysme dans l’émergence d’une nouvelle hiérarchie monétaire, les banques centrales abandonnant un peu plus leurs prérogatives au secteur privé : les banques disposent depuis près d’un siècle de la capacité de création monétaire qui a été, peu à peu, cédée de concert au Shadow Banking. Ce troisième chapitre appelle une réflexion ultérieure sur la place de la banque dans le système financier et sur l’avenir de la création monétaire qui échappe de plus en plus aux banquiers centraux. / The unprecedented scale of the 2007-2008 financial crisis has spawned a vast literature devoted to analyzing the phenomenon of Shadow Banking, considered as the main cause of the banking and financial debacle of the Great Recession, without noticeably providing a global understanding of the phenomena. The main objective of this thesis is, using a positive approach, to study the roots and perform a dissection of the Shadow Banking in order to understand its complexity, establishing a comprehensive understanding of its central role in financing economy and money creation. Before being prescriptive, this study requires above all a positive step that should present facts and mechanisms of an analytical point of view. In this way, this work contributes to the existing literature with a progressive and didactic approach exposing the migration tools of banking risks outside of balance sheets of banks and disentangling fact from fantasy in a thorough reading of the challenges of the Shadow Banking. In this logic, the first chapter of this thesis is devoted to what appeared to be the cause of the crisis of 2007-2008, namely the migration of banks’ assets and risks through credits sales. There is evidences of loan sales for more than forty years, weakening the hypothesis of a recent phenomenon guilty of the original sin leading to the crisis, this burden pretends vested in the securitization. The second chapter of this thesis is thus devoted to the study of securitization and especially of both its origins and its mechanisms. Just like the sale of credit, the assumption of a new phenomenon was quickly ruled out by the long and rich history of the securitization process that spans over four centuries. In contrast to the fledgling and uniquely American phenomenon, securitization reveals its ancient European roots and appears far from being devoid of a certain instability. However, it turned out that the modern form of securitization owes its pattern to the American public sector that, by its choice of using commitments instead of detention of assets, maintaining the mirage of a Midas’ blessing allowing to create ex nihilo quality. If this tale is far from being sustainable, the fact remains that securitization can be a virtuous process offering both quality and yield distribution, reducing information asymmetries, and significantly improving liquidity. However, it remains the preferred medium for banks’ regulatory arbitrages, the later allowed by wait-and-see regulators. Finally, in light of these necessary insights into the tools of modern finance, the third chapter of this thesis is devoted to the study of the Shadow Banking. After exposing its clichés, it offers a lecture of the phenomenon that goes beyond the fantasy of a shadow banking system hidden in the shadows, by providing an approach that gradually leads to the changeover of the financial system to a dynamic and intensive collateral form. This multiplication of insurances then finds its climax in the emergence of a new monetary hierarchy, central banks abandoning their prerogatives to the private sector. Since a century, banks have monetary creation capacities that were, gradually, transferred to the Shadow Banking. This third chapter conclude on the need of further research on the new role of the banking system in the financial system and the future of money creation increasingly eluding central bankers.

Sustainability has gained considerable interest from businesses, academics and in the press in the last two decades. However, the existing sustainability literature says little about what banks gain from moving towards sustainable development. Studies on the relationship between sustainability practices and performance in banks are extremely scarce and have produced inconclusive results. This thesis has two major purposes: to investigate the current sustainability practices in the banking sector and to examine the relationship between sustainability and performance in the banking sector. To achieve this, a sustainability model has been developed for the banking sector taking stakeholders’ effects into consideration. Content analysis was employed to collect the necessary data on stakeholder engagement, communication efforts to stakeholders, strategy and sustainability information. Performance data were obtained from the Bankscope database and 483 bank reports for EU & USA banks over the period 2006-2012 were examined. The data were first analysed using descriptive statistics. The main analysis involved bivariate tests and structural equation modelling path analysis. The results indicate that European banks pay more attention and communicate significantly more with different stakeholder groups than American banks. Banks responded to different degrees to stakeholder issues in their sustainability reports. Moreover, the results show that EU banks carry out more sustainability practices than USA banks. The results also show positive relationships between stakeholders’ salience and all aspects of sustainability; stakeholders’ communications and the environmental aspects of sustainability; size and all sustainability aspects except product sociology. The effect of stakeholder salience on sustainability is more significant in European banks pursuing a sustainability strategy while the effects of communications on sustainability are more significant in American banks with a non-sustainability strategy. Size affects sustainability more in banks with a non-sustainability strategy, but no differences were found for the effect of size on sustainability between the two regions. Furthermore, the results show that the environmental aspects of sustainability are not related to the banks’ performance, but a positive association with the social aspects of sustainability was found. This study is the first to develop a sustainability model for the banking sector. Hence, it makes significant contributions to the sustainability literature. It helps improve our understanding of the different dimensions of sustainability, how they are affected by different stakeholders and strategic orientations, and how they affect the performance of banks. The results of this study can help EU and USA banks to direct their efforts to areas that improve their engagement with stakeholders and their own performance.

This thesis studies the emergence of financial exposures between banks and introduces a novel game of financial network formation. It shows empirically that governance structures influence how banks use the interbank market to manage liquidity and that strategic factors are additional drivers of interbank lending for private banks (Ch. 2). It further develops a model of optimal bank behaviour in the absence of liquidity shocks considering the effect of an exogenous bailout probability (Ch. 3), and introduces a model of endogenous liquidity co-insurance formation (Ch. 4). The first chapter, The Purpose of Interbank Markets, tests competing theories of interbank lending using 43 quarters (2002-2012) of confidential data on the German banking sector and interbank market. It shows that banks use the interbank market for liquidity co-insurance as traditionally assumed. However, the importance of the liquidity management function is higher for regionally-focused credit cooperatives and savings banks than for private commercial banks. A distinct effect for private banks is identified; for private banks, increases in interbank liabilities are shown to correlate with a proxy for the bailout probability of banks. The chapter thus offers empirical support for an emerging literature on strategic behaviour in interbank markets and highlights the need to extend the traditional model of liquidity co-insurance. The second chapter, The Emergence of Interbank Exposures, develops a model showing that, even in the hypothetical absence of liquidity shocks, under some conditions the presence of conditional liability guarantees can lead to interbank exposures as an equilibrium outcome. It shows that such an equilibrium is characterised by banks of different sizes and asymmetric bank behaviour. Some banks are active only as lenders with others investing in a productive technology while borrowing in the interbank market. An equilibrium interbank rate is derived which depends on parameters characterising the bailout probability, including different parameters of government behaviour. The third chapter, Coordination and Competition in the Formation of Financial Networks, introduces a generalisation and extension of the seminal work of Allen and Gale (2000). It studies liquidity co-insurance between deposit-taking banks in an n-region economy. Both a static and a dynamic model of the endogenous formation of interbank liquidity co-insurance links are examined. Using a novel approach to model liquidity co-insurance, it is shown that contrary to previous findings it is not possible for banks with limited information to insure optimally against liquidity shocks. However, in a dynamic formulation of the model with best-response dynamics and learning, socially optimal insurance is an evolutionary stable equilibrium. The chapter also studies an extension to the model that introduces non-zero bailout probabilities, which endogenously leads to interbank networks consistent with the structure of interbank exposure networks documented empirically.

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Academic studies of Bangladeshi Private Commercial Banks (PCBs) have identified issues of Corporate Governance relating to ‘crony capitalism’ and political influence. The thesis combines quantitative and qualitative methods. The research employs conventional econometric panel estimation and a novel method of estimating efficiency using a non-parametric bootstrapping technology. The results reveal significant performance differences. To understand the causes underlying the differences in revenue efficiency and profitability, multiple lenses from theories of Corporate Governance are adopted to design semi-structured interviews. Twenty in-depth interviews from a sample of banks, both managers and board members and industry stakeholders are supplemented with documentary analysis. The quantitative findings reveal a performance gap between 1st Generation PCBs and 2nd and 3rd Generation PCBs in terms of Efficiency and Profitability. 1st Gen PCBs perform worst whereas there is no statistical difference between Gen 2 and Gen 3 PCBs. Moreover, there is no sign of catch-up or improvement for the 1st Generation PCBs. The research demonstrates that an increasing amount of 1st Generation banks’ Non Performing Loans is the main reason for this performance gap. The interview data relate the performance gaps to inadequate Corporate Governance. The research identifies family dominated boards that have encouraged crony capitalism and featherbedding of employees resulting in excessive Non Performing Loans and higher overhead costs. Also, these 1st Generation banks are excessively large in terms of employees, rural branches and remittance earnings leading to a culture of invulnerability to takeover.

This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of using asset securitisation as risk management technique in banks. This study examines the direct impacts of asset securitisation on the riskiness of banks’ loan portfolios as well as the indirect impacts on the subsequent financial stability. This study also tests the changes in banks’ equity capital and liquidity as a result of using asset securitisation in order to understand their potential contributions to the examined bank risk behaviour. Furthermore, this study tests the impacts of adopting the Basel capital requirements on banks’ exposure to asset securitisation and the related bank risk behaviour. The study is informed by stakeholder theory. The use of stakeholder theory in the current study helps in addressing the causal connections between banks’ risk management practices and the achievement of banks’ performance objectives. Using stakeholder theory also helps understand the role of external regulatory structures in supporting risk management practices in banks. The empirical study is conducted by using a sample of 44 bank holding companies selected from 13 European countries during the period 2004-2014. The choice of the sample banks is based on the availability of securitisation data as well as the condition that all European banks should have placed at least one securitisation transaction during the period of the study. Moreover, seven linear regression models were developed to examine the study relationships and were estimated by using Fixed Effects panel data analysis. The use of panel data analysis in this study aims to capture the dynamics of bank risk behaviour and other bank-specific conditions that are associated with asset securitisation during the period of the study. The results found in the empirical analysis confirm that incorporating the use of asset securitisation with higher capital requirements is more likely to reduce originators’ credit risk-taking that arise from their lending activities. The findings reported in this study, however, do not support the regulatory capital arbitrage hypothesis of the securitisation products. Furthermore, this study confirms that European securitising banks continued to view asset securitisation as cost-efficient funding source, despite the decreasing number of transactions since the crisis. The findings in this study also show that European securitising banks did not effectively operate their securitisation proceeds in profitable investments during the period of the study. Based on the results found in the current study, we can suggest that introducing more risk-sensitive capital requirements is a key factor in the future development of the asset securitisation markets. This study contributes to the existing literature by emphasising the direct connections between asset securitisation and the riskiness of banks’ loan portfolios. This study also is one of the first studies to test asset securitisation effects on the absolute level of bank capital in order to provide a better understanding of the regulatory capital arbitrage hypothesis. The current study further extends the existing literature to test the role of the Basel capital requirements in controlling the use of asset securitisation in banks, taking into account the former regulatory frameworks and the full implementation years of the Basel (II) framework. Unlike previous studies, the employment of stakeholder theory in the current study has helped in expanding the perception of risk management in banks, from purely controlling device to a broad approach that aims to support bank’s existence and prosperity. Furthermore, this study is one of the first studies that had a broader look at the European securitisation market, during the years before and after the crisis and compared the empirical results of both sub-samples to validate the robustness of the study findings in terms of the financial crisis.