Short-term safety or long-term failure? Empirical evidence of the impact of securitization on bank risk

Based on a sample of U.S. commercial banks from 2002 to 2012, this paper shows that bank loan securitization has a significant and positive impact on both Z-scores and the likelihood of bank failure, indicating a short-term risk reduction and a long-term risk increase effect. We also find disparate impacts between mortgage and non-mortgage securitization. Loan sale activities are found to have a similar impact to securitization

The effects of bank regulation stringency on seasoned equity offering announcements

We study the relation between bank regulation stringency and announcement effects of seasoned equity offerings across 21 countries. Under a low to moderate bank regulation environment, the market reacts more positively to the bank SEO announcements for an increase in the level of bank regulation. However, the bank SEO announcement effects become more negative if the bank regulation becomes too stringent. This inverted U-shaped relation is robust after we use the exogenous cross-country and cross-year variation in the timing of the Basel II adoption as an instrument to assess the causal impact of bank regulation on SEO announcement effects. Bank regulation has no significant impact of SEO announcement effects if the equity offering is involuntary

Bank intervention and firms’ earnings management: evidence from debt covenant violations

Earnings management has long been one of the main concerns in accounting and management literature, and the extent to which corporate governance mechanisms can discipline management behaviour and prevent earnings management has attracted increasing interest among policy makers and academic researchers. Differing from previous corporate governance literature that focuses mainly on the board and auditors, we explore the role of creditors in corporate governance. In particular, we examine the effect of bank intervention on earnings management via the lens of debt covenant violations, where control rights are transferred to creditors (banks). Using a Difference-in-Difference approach, we find that firms reduce both their accruals-based and real earnings management following debt covenant violations. The negative effect on earnings management is more prominent when banks possess greater bargaining and monitoring power and when firms are more financially constrained. By identifying a specific channel through which debt providers influence corporate financial reporting, our findings suggest that creditors can play an important role in governing organisations and disciplining management behaviour.</p

Credit market development and corporate earnings management: Evidence from banking and branching deregulations

We investigate how external credit market development affects corporate earnings management, by studying the impact of the U.S. interstate banking and branching deregulations on the intensity of accruals-based and real earnings management. We find that the banking and branching deregulations significantly decrease both accruals-based and real earnings-management intensity among firms in deregulated states. The effect is stronger for those deregulated states that have lower bank branch density before deregulation and states that have greater out-of-state bank entry after deregulation. The impact on corporate earnings management is channelled through increased banking competition and credit supply providing firms with easier access to external financing. The findings are robust to various endogeneity concerns. We further document that interstate banking and branching deregulations reduce the instances of financial results being subsequently affected by accounting restatements and improve firms’ information environment.</p

Does uniqueness in banking matter?

We investigate whether and how the uniqueness of banking activities affects the performance and systemic risk of U.S. banks. We find that banks performing more unique activities exhibit higher profitability and lower risk, controlling for size, diversification, and other key characteristics. We further find that banks’ sensitivity to systemic risk displays an inversely U-shaped relation with activity uniqueness. We interpret the impact of uniqueness in analogy to recent theories showing that systemic diversity promotes financial stability. Our study highlights the role of uniqueness in banking and has important implications for policy makers and banking regulators

Evidence that financing decisions contribute to the zero-earnings discontinuity

In this paper we argue that financing decisions contribute to the zero-earnings discontinuity. We find a discontinuity in the distribution of earnings before tax and earnings before special items, but not in the distribution of earnings before interest which suggests that interest expense contributes to the zero-earnings discontinuity. We provide evidence that the impact of financing decisions on the earnings discontinuity can be explained by cost of financing. To investigate the role of interest expense in the zero-earnings discontinuity, we further show that there was a discontinuity in the distribution of the level of debt issues around zero earnings contemporaneous with the zero-earnings discontinuity. We also show that the recent disappearance of zero-earnings discontinuity is coincident with the disappearance of the discontinuity in the debt issuance distribution. Overall, our findings suggest that the level of debt contributed to the zero-earnings discontinuity when it existed.</p

Bank deregulation and corporate social responsibility

We show how external credit market development can affect corporate social responsibility. Using a sample of US public firms over the period 1991–2010, we find that bank deregulation negatively affects CSR performance. We argue that deregulation-induced banking competition enhances credit accessibility, thereby reducing firms’ incentives to pursue CSR as a means of securing stakeholder rewards. Empirical evidence shows that firms increase their use of debt financing in response to the intensified banking competition, and these firms experience a more pronounced decline in CSR performance. We alleviate the potential concern that the observed decline in CSR could be attributed to changes in bank monitoring following deregulation. Further analyses find that firms reduce CSR regardless of their material nature, suggesting that the primary driver of CSR could be the trade-off between costs and returns. Overall, our findings shed light on the strategic motives of CSR, which exhibits adaptability in response to business dynamism. </p

Trading without meeting friends: Empirical evidence from the Wuhan lockdown in 2020

Using a unique proprietary dataset of daily mutual fund trading records and the COVID-19 pandemic-triggered lockdown in Wuhan (China) as a natural experiment, we find that individual mutual fund investors in Wuhan significantly reduced their daily trading frequency, total investment of their portfolios, and risk level of their invested funds during the lockdown period as compared to investors in other cities. The results suggest that the elimination of face-to-face interaction among individual investors during the lockdown reduced their information sharing, which led to more conservatism in their financial trading. We rule out alternative explanations of salience bias due to limited investor attention and temporary changes in personal circumstances such as depression and/or income reduction, during the lockdown period. Finally, consistent with the theory of naïve investor trading, we also find that investors received higher trading returns during the lockdown as they reduced trading aggressively in the absence of face-to-face interactions.</p

Bank regulation and systemic risk: cross country evidence

Using data for banks from 65 countries for the period 2001–2013, we investigate the impact of bank regulation and supervision on individual banks’ systemic risk. Our cross-country empirical findings show that bank activity restriction, initial capital stringency and prompt corrective action are all positively related to systemic risk, measured by Marginal Expected Shortfall. We use the staggered timing of the implementation of Basel II regulation across countries as an exogenous event and use latitude for instrumental variable analysis to alleviate the endogeneity concern. Our results also hold for various robustness tests. We further find that the level of equity banks can alleviate such effect, while bank size is likely to enhance the effect, supporting our conjecture that the impact of bank regulation and supervision on systemic risk is through bank’s capital shortfall. Our results do not argue against bank regulation, but rather focus on the design and implementation of regulation

Why do banks issue equity?

US banks maintain significantly higher capital levels than required by regulatory authorities. In addition to complying with capital regulations, this paper investigates the motivations behind banks' decisions to issue equity. We find that banks use seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) to expand their assets. Our findings indicate that banks conducting SEOs experience not only an increase in their capital ratios but also in deposits and assets in the years following the SEO, compared to the other banks. The newly raised funds are primarily invested in for-sale loans and other loans. There is an overall increase in risk and a decrease in market-to-book value during the post-SEO period. Our results are not driven by changes in deposit supply before or after the bank's SEO and remain robust when tested with alternative placebo-matched samples. Taken together, our findings suggest that banks engage in risk-taking behaviors, and highlight the importance of regulating the size of banks.</p