The concept of “social capital” has received considerable attention these years. Yet, few studies have explored the connections between social capital and bank risk-taking. In this study, I discuss the theory of social capital and its relevance to financial market behavior, and then I analyze the relationship between social capital and bank risk-taking across countries. To measure social capital, I follow Knack and Keefer (1997) and use the data of trust and civic norms collected from the World Values Survey. My measure of bank risk-taking is the nature logarithm of Z-score of each bank. Empirical results show that bank risk-taking is lower in countries where social capital is higher. It is also shown that the impact of social capital is stronger when the level of education in the country is lower. This paper investigates the negative impact of social capital on non-performing loan as well.

No / Purpose – Bank securitisation is deemed to have been a major contributing factor to the 2007/2008 financial crises via fuelling credit growth accompanied by lower banks’ credit standards. Yet, prior to the crisis a common view was that securitisation activity makes the financial system more stable as risk was more easily diversified, managed and allocated economy-wide. The purpose of this paper is to review the extant literature to explore the so far generated knowledge on the impact of securitisation on banking risks. In particular, the authors examine the theoretical arguments and empirical studies on securitisation and banking risks before and after the global financial crisis of 2007/2008. Design/methodology/approach – Review and discussion of the literature. Findings – Theoretical literature univocally accentuate the undesirable consequences of securitisation, which may promote retention of riskier loans, undermine banks’ screening and monitoring incentives and enhance banks’ risk appetite. However, empirical evidence does not uniformly support the theoretical conclusions. If banks are securitisation active they lend more to risky borrowers, have less diversified portfolios and hold less capital, retain riskier loans and are aggressive in loan pricing. Others argue that securitisation reduces banks insolvency risk, increases profitability, provides liquidity and leads to greater supply of loans. Mortgage securitisation is an area where there is consistent evidence of bank risk taking via securitisation. Originality/value – The paper identifies open issues for future research.

In this dissertation, we first examine the relationship between performance of the bank holding company and several board characteristics. We use five proxies for bank performance including Tobin’s Q, ROA, loan loss reserve ratio, non-performing asset ratio, and net charge-offs ratio. Board characteristic variables we include are board size, proportion of outsiders, CEO power, CEO tenure and board tenure. We find that a large board enhances bank performance, as proxied by Tobin’s Q and loan quality variables. We find no evidence that board structure or CEO power influences firm performance. We see that CEO and board tenure have a positive effect on firm performance. We further employ a crisis dummy during the period 2007 through 2009 to determine if the relationships between firm performance and board characteristics changed during the crisis. Our crisis results show us that board size has a negative effect on Tobin’s Q and the non-performing asset ratio during the crisis. Further, we find that board structure decreases the non-performing asset ratio during the crisis. We next examine the relationship between risk-taking of the bank holding company and several board characteristics. We use four accounting based proxies for bank risk-taking including credit risk, liquidity risk, capital ratio and operational risk. We also use three market based proxies for bank risk including market beta, idiosyncratic risk and the standard deviation of its stock return. Board characteristic variables we include are board size, board independence, CEO duality, CEO tenure and board tenure. We find that a large board reduces both balance sheet and market risk. We further investigate the relationships between risk-taking and board characteristics changed during the financial crisis of 2007-2009. We find that our results are robust during the crisis.

These three studies on the effect of national culture on banking aim at advancing knowledge and understanding of bank risk-taking, deposits and profitability by adding culture to their determining factors. Banking is a highly regulated industry, and one would expect informal institutions such as national culture not to influence management decisions. However, it seems that bank managers but also bank customers are susceptible to cultural biases making their influence on risk taking, deposit and profitability levels statistically and economically significant. In the first study, I find that national culture is an important bank-risk determinant. Specifically, I find a positive (negative) association between the cultural values of individualism and hierarchy (trust) and domestic bank risk-taking. This relation weakened during the recent financial crisis and does not hold for global banks, regardless of the period under investigation. In the second study, I report a positive association between trust and deposits which holds for domestic as well as global banks, supporting the popular view that banking is based on trust. Motivated by two relatively new regulations (Net Stability Funding Ratio and Liquidity Coverage Ratio), enforced to safeguard stable liquidity, I use interaction effects to find that high deposit volatility mitigates the positive impact of trust on deposit levels. In the third study, I identify national culture as an important determinant of bank profitability. Looking separately into global and domestic banks, the former are less prone to cultural influences compared to the latter. Furthermore, domestic banks with foreign ownership/management are less susceptible to cultural biases compared to domestic banks with local ownership/management. Finally, banks operating in conservative, hierarchical societies are expected to face more challenges with fintech disturbance, compared to banks operating in egalitarian societies. My results are statistically and economically significant and robust to endogeneity tests mitigating reverse causality and confounding effect concerns.

The thesis sheds light on key policy issues emerging from the recent Global Financial Crisis. The first chapter studies whether expansionary monetary policy contributes to bank risk-taking, in the case of Asia. I rely on panel data analysis covering 432 banks in 9 Asian countries over the year 2000-2011. The ratio of risky assets to total assets serves as a risk-taking indicator. The results support the existence of the bank risk-taking channel, which is more pronounced for banks listed on the stock market. I also report new findings with respect to how banks take more risk following monetary expansion. Importantly, evidence of excessive leverage is not found. The second chapter constructs a model for analyzing bank risk-taking. I embed firm heterogeneity, endogenous default risk and capital adequacy regulation into both RBC and NK DSGE models. A subset of the firms can partially default on their loans obligation but subject to non-pecuniary default penalty. With those financial frictions in place, I find that standard macroeconomic shocks can induce banks to engage in higher risk-taking. The chapter then explores the effectiveness of several macro-prudential tools in mitigating risk-taking. I find countercyclical capital buffers and risky to total asset ratio targeting to be effective. The third chapter emphasises the spillover effects of shocks originating in the housing and financial market on the real economy. I embed endogenous mortgage default into a New Keynesian model that features housing and the banking sector. The latter faces capital regulation. We study two key shocks, namely shocks to the variance of idiosyncratic housing shock and shocks to the penalty on capital regulation. Both are instrumental in causing a surge in mortgage default and loans risk premium, which constrains bank lending activity. The chapter later introduces three macroprudential measures to explore whether they improve economic stability and welfare.

In this thesis, we use a wide cross-sectional sample of both privately held and publicly listed European banks over the period 1999 to 2008 to analyse the role played by bank shareholder incentives in the performance of banks and, ultimately, on the capital allocation efficiency of the economy as a whole. In our first essay, we use the entire range of Bankscope and Amadeus Top 250,000 to construct the portfolios of shareholders who hold equity stakes in banks for each year. We show that about 62 per cent of the ultimate largest shareholders of banks are diversified investors, holding on average equity investments from thirteen companies in their portfolio. We exploit this heterogeneity to investigate the impact of their portfolio diversification on bank risk-taking. Our results show that the relationship between portfolio diversification and bank risk-taking is both statistically significant and economically sizeable. Overall, these findings contribute to the literature by providing novel evidence on the characteristics of bank shareholders’ portfolios and by studying an explicit channel through which shareholders’ incentives for risk-taking affect the banks’ risk. In our second essay, we build on our previous evidence to further investigate whether the level of diversification of bank shareholders has any effect on the efficiency of capital allocation in the economy. We aggregate our data at regional level, using information on the address where companies and banks have their headquarters and identify regions based on Eurostat Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS) definitions. Our results indicate that capital appears to be allocated more efficiently in regions where banks are controlled by (more) diversified shareholders. In particular, a change in value-added growth increases capital investment by approximately 8 per cent of its mean in regions where banks are controlled by undiversified shareholders, while it increases capital investment by almost 21 per cent in regions where banks are controlled by shareholders with diversified portfolios. These findings contribute to the literature by studying a specific novel channel through which financial development, in the form of bank shareholders’ diversification, affects the real economy. Lastly, in our third essay we combine our detailed micro-level data on ownership with commercial loans market data from Dealscan to evaluate evidence of related lending in Western European banks. In doing so, we are able to explicitly identify related loans and provide original evidence of related lending and preferential lending terms. We show that 14 per cent of banks in our sample engage in related lending, and that firms borrowing from their related banks have lower costs and higher access to credit. Given these findings, we then proceed to analyse the effect of related lending in bank performance. Our tests show that banks participating in related lending experience an increase in average returns of 11 per cent. Results are both statistically significant and economically sizeable. Overall, our findings contribute to the literature by providing evidence in support the information asymmetry view of related lending, suggesting that in countries with strong rule of law related lending may become a relevant mechanism for informational capital accumulation for banks, allowing them to make more profitable lending decisions.

My dissertation topic is on the impact of changes in the monetary policy interest rate target on bank distress and systemic risk in the U.S. banking system. The financial crisis of 2007-2009 had devastating effects on the banking system worldwide. The feeble performance of financial institutions during the crisis heightened the necessity of understanding systemic risk exhibited the critical role of monitoring the banking system, and strongly necessitated quantification of the risks to which banks are exposed, for incorporation in policy formulation. In the aftermath of the crisis, US bank regulators focused on overhauling the then existing regulatory framework in order to provide comprehensive capital buffers against bank losses. In this context, the Basel Committee proposed in 2011, the Basel III framework in order to strengthen the regulatory capital structure as a buffer against bank losses. The reform under Basel III framework aimed at raising the quality and the quantity of regulatory capital base and enhancing the risk coverage of the capital structure. Separately, US bank regulators adopted the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (2010) to implement stress tests on systemically important bank holding companies (SIBs). Concerns about system-wide distress have broadened the debate on banking regulation towards a macro prudential approach. In this context, limiting bank risk and systemic risk has become a prolific research field at the crossroads of banking, macroeconomics, econometrics, and network theory over the last decade (Kuritzkes et al., 2005; Goodhart and Sergoviano, 2008; Geluk et al., 2009; Acharya et al., 2010, 2017; Tarashev et al., 2010; Huang et al., 2012; Browless and Engle, 2012, 2017 and Cummins, 2014). The European Central Bank (ECB) (2010) defines systemic risk as a risk of financial instability “so widespread that it impairs the functioning of a financial system to the point where economic growth and welfare suffer materially.” While US bank regulators and policy-makers have moved to strengthen the regulatory framework in the post-crisis period in order to prevent another financial crisis, a growing recent line of research has suggested that there is a significant link between monetary policy and bank distress (Bernanke, Gertler and Gilchrist, 1999; Borio and Zhu, 2008; Gertler and Kiyotaki, 2010; Delis and Kouretas, 2010; Gertler and Karadi, 2011; Delis et al., 2017). In my research, I examine the link between the monetary policy and bank distress. In the first chapter, I investigate the impact of the federal funds rate (FFR) changes on the banking system distress between 2001 and 2013 within an unrestricted vector auto-regression model. The Fed used FFR as a primary policy tool before the financial crisis of 2007-2009, but focused on quantitative easing (QE) during the crisis and post-crisis periods when the FFR hit the zero bound. I use the Taylor rule rate (TRR, 1993) as an “implied policy rate”, instead of the FFR, to account for the impact of QE on the economy. The base model of distress includes three macroeconomic indicators—real GDP growth, inflation, and TRR—and a systemic risk indicator (Expected capital shortfall (ES)). I consider two model extensions; (i) I include a measure of bank lending standards to account for the changes in the systemic risk due to credit tightening, (ii) I replace inflation with house price growth rate to see if the results remain robust. Three main results can be drawn. First, the impulse response functions (IRFs) show that raising the monetary policy rate contributed to insolvency problems for the U.S. banks, with a one percentage point increase in the rate raising the banking systemic stress by 1.6 and 0.8 percentage points, respectively, in the base and extend models. Second, variance decomposition (VDs) analysis shows that up to ten percent of error variation in systemic risk indicator can be attributed to innovations in the policy rate in the extended model. Third, my results supplement the view that policy rate hikes led to housing bubble burst and contributed to the financial crisis of 2007-2009. This is an example for how monetary policy-making gets more complex and must be conducted with utmost caution if there is a bubble in the economy. In the second chapter, I examine the prevalence and asymmetry of the effects on bank distress from positive and negative shocks to the target fed fund rate (FFR) in the period leading to the financial crisis (2001-2008). A panel model with three blocks of control variables is used. The blocks include: positive/negative FFR shocks, macroeconomic drivers, and bank balance sheet indicators. A distress indicator similar to Texas Ratio is used to proxy distress. Shocks to FFR are defined along the lines suggested by Morgan (1993). Three main results are obtained. First, FFR shocks, either positive or negative, raise bank distress over the following year. Second, the magnitudes of the effects from positive and negative shocks are unequal (asymmetric); a 100 bps positive (negative) shock raises the bank distress indicator (scaled from 0 to 1) by 9 bps (3 bps) over the next year. Put differently, after a 100 bps positive (negative) shock, the probability of bankruptcy rises from 10% to 19% (13%). Third, expanding operations into non-banking activities by FHCs does not benefit them in terms of distress due to unanticipated changes in the FFR as FFR shocks (positive or negative) create similar levels of distress for BHCs and FHCs. In the third chapter, I explore the systemic risk contributions of U.S. bank holding companies (BHCs) from 2001 to 2015 by using the expected shortfall approach. Developed by analogy with the component expected shortfall concept, I decompose the aggregate systemic risk, as measured by expected shortfall, into several subgroups of banks by using publicly available balance sheet data to define the probability of bank default. The risk measure, thus, encompasses the entire universe of banks. I find that concentration of assets in a smaller number of larger banks raises systemic risk. The systemic risk contribution of banks designated as SIFIs increased sharply during the financial crisis and reached 74% at the end of 2015. Two-thirds of this risk contribution is attributed to the four largest banks in the U.S.: Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Wells Fargo. I also find that diversifying business operations by expanding into nontraditional operations does not reduce the systemic risk contribution of financial holding companies (FHCs). In general, FHCs are individually riskier than BHCs despite their more diversified basket of products; FHCs contribute a disproportionate amount to systemic risk given their size, all else being equal. I believe monetary policy-making in the last decade carries many lessons for policy makers. Particularly, the link between the monetary policy target rate and bank distress and systemic risk is an interesting topic by all accounts due to its implications and challenges (explained in more detail in first and second chapters). The literature studying the relation between bank distress and monetary policy is fairly small but developing fast. The models I investigate in my work are simple in many ways but they may serve as a basis for more sophisticated models. / Economics

Submitted by ramon silva vilarins (rsvilarins@gmail.com) on 2016-06-23T12:02:04Z No. of bitstreams: 1 tese_final.pdf: 914787 bytes, checksum: f76ebd195ce25157615f7f14bebdee55 (MD5) / Rejected by Pamela Beltran Tonsa (pamela.tonsa@fgv.br), reason: Bom dia Ramon, Para que possamos dar andamento a sua submissão é necessário um pequeno ajuste. RESUMO E ABSTRACT não pode ter borda. Apos o ajuste submeter novamente para analise. Qualquer duvida estamos a disposição. Att, Pâmela. Tonsa on 2016-06-23T14:25:04Z (GMT) / Submitted by ramon silva vilarins (rsvilarins@gmail.com) on 2016-06-23T14:43:13Z No. of bitstreams: 1 tese_final.pdf: 914257 bytes, checksum: c2720e7e809ab96d52c03e041847360c (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Pamela Beltran Tonsa (pamela.tonsa@fgv.br) on 2016-06-23T14:48:08Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 tese_final.pdf: 914257 bytes, checksum: c2720e7e809ab96d52c03e041847360c (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-06-23T14:49:28Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 tese_final.pdf: 914257 bytes, checksum: c2720e7e809ab96d52c03e041847360c (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-06-01 / This dissertation analyzes the impact of government bailout policies on the risk of the banking sector in OECD countries between 2005 and 2013. First, in line with the moral hazard hypothesis, I verify that financial institutions with high bailout expectations assume higher risks than others. Second, I find that, in normal times, rescue guarantees to large financial institutions distort competition in the sector and increase the risk of the other institutions. However, during the recent financial crisis, increases in the rescue expectation of competitors of an institution, to the extent that they represent a reduction in its chance of bailout, decrease its risk taking. Additionally, in a crisis period, I find that the deterioration in the countries’ sovereign capacity to bailout banks is associated with lower risk taking; on average, i.e., the increase in risk taking is higher in countries with a lower credit default swap spread. / Esta tese analisa, entre 2005 e 2013, o impacto das políticas governamentais de resgate sobre o risco do setor bancário nos países da OCDE. Primeiro, em linha com a hipótese de moral hazard, verifica-se que instituições financeiras com expectativa elevada de bailout, assumem riscos mais elevados do que as demais. Segundo, constata-se que, em períodos normais, garantias de socorro às grandes instituições distorcem a competição no setor e incrementa o risco das demais. Durante a crise, entretanto, mostra-se que elevações na expectativa de resgate dos concorrentes de uma instituição, à medida que representa uma redução em sua chance de eventual socorro governamental, diminuem sua tomada de riscos. Adicionalmente, em período de crise também é evidenciado que: reduções na capacidade financeira dos países estão associadas a menor assunção de riscos; em média, o aumento na tomada de riscos é maior nos países com menor spread de Credit Default Swap.

This dissertation is composed of four essays that empirically investigate three topics in financial economics; financial stress and its leading indicators, the relationship between bank competition and financial stability, and the link between management board composition and bank risk. In the first essay we examine which variables have predictive power for financial stress in 25 OECD countries, using a recently constructed financial stress index. We find that panel models can hardly explain FSI dynamics. Although better results are achieved in country models, our findings suggest that financial stress is hard to predict out-of- sample despite the reasonably good in-sample performance of the models. The second essay develops an early warning framework for assessing systemic risks and predicting systemic events over two horizons of different length on a panel of 14 countries. We build a financial stress index to identify the starting dates of systemic financial crises and select crisis-leading indicators in a two-step approach; we find relevant prediction horizons for each indicator and employ Bayesian model averaging to identify the most useful predictors. We find superior performance of the long-horizon model for the Czech Republic. The theoretical literature gives conflicting predictions on how bank...