Finance and growth in a bank-based economy: is it quantity or quality that matters?

With this paper we seek to contribute to the literature on the relation between finance and growth. We argue that most studies in the field fail to measure the quality of financial intermediation but rather resort to using proxies on the size of financial systems. Moreover, cross-country comparisons suffer from the disadvantage that systematic differences between markedly different economies may drive the result that finance matters. To circumvent these two problems we examine the importance of the quality of banks' financial intermediation in the regions of one economy only : Germany. To approximate the quality of financial intermediation we use cost effciency estimates derived with stochastic frontier analysis. We find that the quantity of supplied credit is indeed insignificant when a measure of intermediation quality is included. In turn, the efficiency of intermediation is robust, also after excluding banks likely to operate in multiple regions and distinguishing between different banking pillars active in Germany. --Finance-growth nexus,financial intermediation,regional growth

Does regional redistribution spur growth?

After the German reunification, interregional subsidies accounted for approximately four percent of gross fixed capital investment in the new federal states. We show that between 1992 and 2005 infrastructure and (small) business aid had a negative net impact on regional economic growth. This suggests that regional redistribution was ineffective, potentially due to a lack of spatial concentration to create growth poles. --Regional growth,redistribution,infrastructure,investment subsidies

The quiet life hypothesis in banking : evidence from German savings banks

The "quiet life hypothesis (QLH)" posits that banks enjoy the advantages of market power in terms of foregone revenues or cost savings. We suggest a unified approach to measure competition and efficiency simultaneously to test this hypothesis. We estimate bank-specific Lerner indices as measures of competition and test if cost and profit efficiency are negatively related to market power in the case of German savings banks.We find that both market power and average revenues declined among these banks between 1996 and 2006. While we find clear evidence supporting the QLH, estimated effects of the QLH are small from an economical perspective

The quality of banking and regional growth

We test whether output growth in European economic agglomeration regions depends on financial development. To this end we suggest a relative measure of the quality of financial institutions rather than the usual quantity proxy of financial development. In order to measure the quality of financial development we use profit efficiency derived from stochastic frontier analysis. We show that more efficient banks spur regional growth while the typically used quantity measure of financial development is negligible. Also, our results suggest an additional channel through which better banking can spur growth: the interaction of more credit with efficient banks. --Bank performance,regional growth,bank efficiency,Europe

Real estate markets and bank distress

We investigate the relationship between real estate markets and bank distress among German universal and specialized mortgage banks between 1995 and 2004. Higher house prices increase the value of collateral, which reduces the probability of bank distress (PDs). But higher prices at given rents may also indicate excessive expectations regarding the present value of real estate assets, which can increase PDs. Increasing price-to-rent ratios are positively related to PDs and larger real estate exposures amplify this effect. Rising real estate price levels alone reduce bank PDs, but only for banks with large real estate market exposure. This suggests a positive, but relatively small 'collateral' effect for banks with more expertise in specialized mortgage lending. Likewise, lower price-to-rent ratios are estimated to reduce the riskiness of banks. The multilevel logit model used here further shows that real estate markets are regionally segmented and location-specific effects contribute significantly to predicted bank PDs. --Real estate,distress,universal vs. specialized banks

Efficient, profitable and safe banking: an oxymoron? Evidence from a panel VAR approach

Efficiency is considered a key factor when evaluating a bank's performance. Moreover, efficiency enhancement is an explicit policy objective in the Single Market Directive of the European Commission. But efficiency improvements may come at the expense of deteriorating bank profits and excessive risk-taking. Both the quantitative effects and dynamic reactions of performance in response to efficiency improvements remain often unclear on both theoretical and empirical grounds. We analyze the dynamic relations between efficiency and performance in the German banking market. To this end we use panel data for all German banks for the years from 1993 to 2004 and estimate impulse response functions (IRF) derived from a vector autoregressive model. The IRF estimate the response of a shock in efficiency on profits or default probabilities. The former is estimated with stochastic frontier analysis, the latter is estimated with a hazard rate model. The results indicate that a positive unit shift in efficiency reduces the probability of default and increases profits. On the one hand, we find evidence that the long-run impact of profit efficiency on risk is larger than for cost efficiency. However, cost efficiency impacts with a shorter time lag on the probability of default. On the other hand, cost efficiency has on average a slightly larger impact on profits than profit efficiency. --Bank performance,efficiency,bank failure,vector autoregression,performance forecast

Slippery slopes of stress: ordered failure events in German banking

Outright bank failures without prior indication of financial instability are very rare. Supervisory authorities monitor banks constantly. Thus, they usually obtain early warning signals that precede ultimate failure and, in fact, banks can be regarded as troubled to varying degrees before outright closure. But to our knowledge virtually all studies that predict bank failures neglect the ordinal nature of bank distress. Exploiting the distress database of the Deutsche Bundesbank we distinguish four different distress events that banks experience. Only the worst entails a bank to exit the market. Weaker orders of distress are, first, compulsory notifications of the authorities about potential problems, second, corrective actions such as warnings and hearings and, third, actions by banking pillar's insurance schemes. Since the four categories of hazard functions are not proportional, we specify a generalized ordered logit model to estimate the respective probabilities of distress simultaneously. Our model estimates each set of probabilities with high accuracy and confirms, first, the necessity to account for different kinds of distress events and, second, the violation of the proportional odds assumption implicit in most limited dependent analyses of bank failure. --Bank,failure,distress,generalized ordered logit

The implications of latent technology regimes for competition and efficiency in banking

Banks continue to differ in many ways, for instance with respect to business models, growth strategies, or financial health. Neglecting these differences confuses inefficiency with heterogeneity while sub-sample estimation prohibits efficiency comparisons across different samples. We use a latent class stochastic frontier model to estimate simultaneously multiple technology regimes and group membership probabilities. The latter are conditioned on six bank traits of German banks and we identify four signifficantly different technology regimes. Only small, retail focused banks exhibit cost inefficiencies, which are 5.4% on average and thus substantially lower compared to previous studies. We use technology regime specific cost parameters to measure competition with Lerner indices. Large, national universal banks and the smallest, most specialized banks exhibit the lowest level of competition. In turn, medium sized universal banks are both efficient and exhibit the lowest Lerner margins between 1994 and 2004. -- Das deutsche Bankwesen wird oft als Drei-Säulen-System bezeichnet, welches aus Sparkassen, Geschäfts-, und Genossenschaftsbanken besteht. Diese Systematik wird oft als geradezu natürliche Marktsegmentierung verstanden. Banken können sich jedoch auch zwischen und innerhalb der drei Säulen hinsichtlich anderer Kriterien unterscheiden, zum BeispielWachstumsstrategien, Stabilitätseigenschaften oder Geschäftsmodellen. Viele vergleichenden Studien definieren oftmals vorab Teilstichproben, um diese Unterschiede zu berücksichtigen. Jede Bildung von Bankengruppen beinhaltet jedoch unweigerlich eine zum Teil willkürliche Komponente und verhindert außerdem den Vergleich relativer Effizienzmaße zwischen Teilstichproben. In dieser Studie benutzen wir ein latent class frontier model (LCFM), um unterschiedliche Technologiegruppen empirisch zu schätzen anstatt sie zu definieren. Wir ermitteln die Wahrscheinlichkeit der Gruppenzugehörigkeit (GZW) je Bank in Abhängigkeit von sechs individuellen Charakteristika. Für jede Technologiegruppe leiten wir Wettbewerbsma?e ab und untersuchen deren Entwicklung zwischen 1994 und 2004.Banks,competition,efficiency,latent class frontier,strategy

Regional growth and finance in Europe: Is there a quality effect of bank efficiency?

In this study, we test whether regional growth in 11 European countries depends on financial development and suggest the use of cost- and profit-efficiency estimates as quality measures for financial institutions. Contrary to the usual quantitative proxies for financial development, the quality of financial institutions is measured in this study as the relative ability of banks to intermediate funds. An improvement in bank efficiency spurs five times more regional growth than does an identical increase in credit. More credit provided by efficient banks exerts an independent growth effect in addition to the direct quantity and quality channel effects.bank performance; regional growth; bank efficiency; Europe

The cost efficiency of German banks: a comparison of SFA and DEA

We investigate the consistency of efficiency scores derived with two competing frontier methods in the financial economics literature: Stochastic Frontier and Data Envelopment Analysis. We sample 34,192 observations for all German universal banks and analyze whether efficiency measures yield consistent results according to five criteria between 1993 and 2004: levels, rankings, identification of extreme performers, stability over time and correlation to standard accounting-based measures of performance. We find that non-parametric methods are particularly sensitive to measurement error and outliers. Furthermore, our results show that accounting for systematic differences among commercial, cooperative and savings banks is important to avoid misinterpretation about the status of efficiency of the total banking sector. Finally, despite ongoing fundamental changes in Europe?s largest banking system, efficiency rank stability is very high in the short run. However, we also find that annually estimated efficiency scores are markedly less stable over a period of twelve years, in particular for parametric methods. Thus, the implicit assumption of serial independence of bank production in most methods has an important influence on obtained efficiency rankings. --Cost Efficiency,Banks,Stochastic Frontier Approach,Data Envelopment Analysis