Refine
Document Type
- Working Paper (3)
- Report (2)
Language
- English (5)
Has Fulltext
- yes (5)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (5)
Keywords
- leverage (4)
- Basel III (2)
- bailout (2)
- capital regulation (2)
- compensation (2)
- cycle flows (2)
- cyclical liabilities (2)
- interbank network (2)
- risk (2)
- Real Effects (1)
The ECB’s Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) program, launched in summer 2012, indirectly recapitalized periphery country banks through its positive impact on the value of sovereign bonds. However, the regained stability of the European banking sector has not fully transferred into economic growth. We show that zombie lending behavior of banks that still remained undercapitalized after the OMT announcement is an important reason for this development. As a result, there was no positive impact on real economic activity like employment or investment. Instead, firms mainly used the newly acquired funds to build up cash reserves. Finally, we document that creditworthy firms in industries with a high prevalence of zombie firms suffered significantly from the credit misallocation, which slowed down the economic recovery.
This paper presents a theory that explains why it is beneficial for banks to engage in circular lending activities on the interbank market. Using a simple network structure, it shows that if there is a non-zero bailout probability, banks can significantly increase the expected repayment of uninsured creditors by entering into cyclical liabilities on the interbank market before investing in loan portfolios. Therefore, banks are better able to attract funds from uninsured creditors. Our results show that implicit government guarantees incentivize banks to have large interbank exposures, to be highly interconnected, and to invest in highly correlated, risky portfolios. This can serve as an explanation for the observed high interconnectedness between banks and their investment behavior in the run-up to the subprime mortgage crisis.
Basel III and CEO compensation in banks: pay structures as a regulatory signal : [March 6, 2013]
(2013)
This paper proposes a new regulatory approach that implements capital requirements contingent on managerial compensation. We argue that excessive risk taking in the financial sector originates from the shareholder moral hazard created by government guarantees rather than from corporate governance failures within banks. The idea of the proposed regulation is to utilize the compensation scheme to drive a wedge between the interests of top management and shareholders to counteract shareholder risk-shifting incentives. The decisive advantage of this approach compared to existing regulation is that the regulator does not need to be able to properly measure the bank investment risk, which has been shown to be a difficult task during the 2008-2009 financial crisis.
This paper presents a theory that explains why it is beneficial for banks to engage in circular lending activities on the interbank market. Using a simple network structure, it shows that if there is a non-zero bailout probability, banks can significantly increase the expected repayment of uninsured creditors by entering into cyclical liabilities on the interbank market before investing in loan portfolios. Therefore, banks are better able to attract funds from uninsured creditors. Our results show that implicit government guarantees incentivize banks to have large interbank exposures, to be highly interconnected, and to invest in highly correlated, risky portfolios. This can serve as an explanation for the observed high interconnectedness between banks and their investment behavior in the run-up to the subprime mortgage crisis.
The paper analyzes the mutual influence of the capital structure and the investment decision of a bank, as well as the incentive effects of the bank executives compensation schemes on these decisions. In case the government implicitly or explicitly insures deposits and/or the banks debt, banks are incentivized to invest in risky assets and to have a high leverage. Capital regulation could potentially solve this excessive risk taking problem. However, this is only possible if the regulator can observe and properly measure the investment risks of the bank, which was called into question during the 2008-09 financial crisis. Hence, we propose a regulatory approach that is also able to implement the first best risk taking levels by the bank, but does not require the regulator to know the investment risk of the bank. The regulatory approach involves the implementation of capital requirements, which are made contingent on the management compensation.
