New bank resolution mechanisms: is it the end of the bailout era?

We study the effectiveness of three common bank resolution mechanisms: bailouts, bank sales, and ‘bad banks’. We first apply the financial fragility model of Goodhart et al. (2005, 2006a) to analyze the impact of these resolution mechanisms on bank behavior. We then use a novel bank-level database on 39 countries that used these resolution mechanisms during 1992-2017 and analyze the relationship between the mechanisms applied and subsequent bank performance. We find that the effectiveness of resolution mechanisms depends crucially on the timing and severity of crises. While mergers can deliver good results at the beginning of a crisis, this is less likely at later stages of a crisis. In the event of severe crises, mechanisms aimed at restructuring bank balance sheets are most likely to deliver positive results. We find no support for bank bailouts as an optimal strategy. A calibration exercise shows that the effectiveness of resolution mechanisms to mitigate systemic risk declines with the severity of crises

States, Banks, and the Financing of the Economy: Fiscal Policy and Sovereign Risk Perspectives

On 5-6 September 2012 SUERF held its 30th Colloquium “States, Banks, and the Financing of the Economy” at the University of Zürich, Switzerland. The papers included in this SUERF Study are based on contributions to the Colloquium. All the chapters in this publication discuss from different angles the complex interrelations between states and financial systems, which have developed in recent years with economic, financial and sovereign debt crises. While the contributions included here primarily look at fiscal policy and sovereign risk perspectives, papers on the monetary policy and regulatory perspectives, which were also dealt with at the Zürich Colloquium, will be published in SUERF Study 2012/3 “States, Banks, and the Financing of the Economy: Monetary Policy and Regulatory Perspectives”

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

Transmission of Bank Liquidity Shocks in Loan and Deposit Markets: The Role of Interbank Borrowing and Market Monitoring

We examine the international transmission of liquidity shocks from multinational bank holding companies to their subsidiaries during the financial crisis of 2008. Our results demonstrate that a subsidiary's reduction in lending is strongly related to its parent bank's lending via the interbank market. While subsidiaries that were dependent on interbank financing increased their credit supply prior to the crisis, they reduced their lending activities during the crisis. Additionally, we observe that interbank-dependent subsidiaries tried to change their funding strategy when they were unable to increase their deposit growth significantly during the crisis. During the crisis, subsidiaries could not rely on their parent banks' support via the interbank market and encountered problems in attracting new depositors, which could explain the significant decline in lending during the financial crisis. These findings highlight the need to regulate and monitor multinational funding strategies, especially in the interbank market