Bank capital structure, regulatory capital, and securities innovations

Although financial instruments that, in effect, permit corporations to treat preferred stock dividends as tax-deductible interest have been used by nonfinancial corporations since late 1993, bank holding companies (BHCs) did not issue these trust-preferred securities (TPS) until 1996, when the Federal Reserve qualified them as Tier-1 capital. We delineate and test hypotheses with 1) analyses of the stock-market reaction to the Fed’s ruling and to TPS filings and 2) comparisons of BHCs that issued TPS with those that did not. We conclude that regulatory capital requirements, tax savings, and uninsured sources of funds can have significant positive effects on BHCs’ demand for capital; growth and investment opportunities have an inconclusive effect; and transaction costs have a negative effect. Our results are not consistent with the moral-hazard hypothesis.Bank capital ; Bank holding companies ; Bank supervision ; Securities

The International Debt Crisis, Investor Contagion, and Bank Security Returns in 1987: The Brazilian Experience.

The authors use event-study methods to examine security returns for the twenty-five largest U.S. bank holding companies surrounding two events: (1) Citicorp's $3 billion loan-loss-reserve decision of May 19, 1987 and (2) subsequent follow-the-leader behavior by other major banking companies. Although the market anticipated rational follow-the-leader behavior and rewarded it, the events were only partially anticipated. The authors interpret the loan-loss-reserve decisions as foreshadowing the write-down of LDC loans. Such bookkeeping entries affect market prices because they signal economic value-enhancing corporate and strategic restructurings. Copyright 1990 by Ohio State University Press.

Syndicated Loan Announcements and the Market Value of the Banking Firm.

This paper examines valuation effects on the stocks of fifteen participating money-center banks of 774 announcements of syndicated loans, representing announcements of investment decisions for the lenders. The authors find that announcements of LDC loans in the 1970s, especially those to Latin American borrowers, are associated with negative abnormal returns to the lending banks while announcements of loans to U.S. corporate borrowers in the 1980s, especially those for takover finance, are associated with positive abnormal returns. While a number of testable predictions are consistent with the negative abnormal returns for Latin American loans, they explain response to takeover loans with a return-to-liquidity hypothesis. Copyright 1995 by Ohio State University Press.