"Whatever it takes": an empirical assessment of the value of policy actions in banking

What types of policy intervention had a greater impact during the financial crisis? By using a detailed dataset of worldwide policy, we answer this question focusing on Globally-Systemically Important banks (G-SIBs), looking both to stock returns and Credit Default Swap (CDS) spreads reactions. As robustness checks, we also analyze a control sample of 31 large Non-Financial Companies (NFCs). Overall, we show that different policy interventions from governments and central banks have produced diverse market reactions: investors generally appreciate monetary policy interventions for G-SIBs (but not for NFCs) and do not welcome bank failures and bailouts (for both G-SIBs and NCFs)

Efficiency and risk in european banking

We analyze the impact of efficiency on bank risk. We also consider whether bank capital has an effect on this relationship. We model the inter-temporal relationships among efficiency, capital and risk for a large sample of commercial banks operating in the European Union. We find that reductions in cost and revenue efficiencies increase banks’ future risks thus supporting the bad management and efficiency version of the moral hazard hypotheses. In contrast, bank efficiency improvements contribute to shore up bank capital levels. Our findings suggest that banks lagging behind in their efficiency levels might expect higher risk and subdued capital positions in the near future. JEL Classification: G21, D24, C23, E44banking risk, capital, Efficiency

Do Islamic and conventional banks have the same technology?

Is there a technology gap between Islamic and conventional banks? Do Islamic and conventional banks have different cost efficiency levels? We show that conventional and Islamic banks have similar mean (aggregate) cost efficiency levels in the MENA area and there is no technology gap between the two types of banks. At the country level, Islamic banks are more cost efficient than conventional banks in Indonesia, Pakistan, Turkey and United Arab Emirates, and less efficient in Bangladesh, Kuwait, Malaysia and Tunisia. We analyse a very large sample of banks in twelve MENA and South East Asian countries between 2000 and 2006 and we use the meta-frontier approach to account for the sample heterogeneity

Corporate culture and shareholder value in banking industry

This paper analyses the casual relationship between corporate culture and shareholder value using a sample of large banks in the French, German, Italian and U.K. banking systems over the 2000 to 2003 period. Firstly, we measure shareholder value using an Economic Value Added estimated through a procedure tailored to account for banking peculiarities. Secondly, we measure corporate culture using language as its particular artifact and developing a cultural survey based on the application of a text-analysis model to a corpus of reference texts produced by the sample of banks. We posit six hypotheses regarding the relationship between corporate culture and bank profits and shareholder value. Our results noticeably show that bank profits and shareholder value benefit from different orientations of banking corporate culture.

Stock market reaction to policy interventions

We analyse stock price reactions to the announcements of monetary and fiscal policy actions in 12 stock exchanges worldwide between 1 June 2007 and 30 June 2012. While past papers have analysed the effect of policy interventions focusing on monetary policy actions (e.g. Ricci 2015), our paper focuses on stock indices either capturing the whole stock market or various industries. By estimating abnormal stock reactions around the announcement date, we show that (1) stock industry indices react to policy interventions in a different manner than the broad stock index does; (2) stock returns react negatively to restriction measures for general and non-banking sector indices; and (3) stock reaction to expansionary measures was stronger at the beginning of the financial crisis

Bank Funding Strategy After the Bail-in Announcement

Euro area countries have recently moved to a new centralized bail-in framework by removing implicit public guarantees. Our paper analyzes banks’ funding strategies after the bail-in proposal. We show that Euro area banks relied more on cheaper and better protected sources of funding, such as deposits, and reduced fund collection from sources with a weaker creditor protection, such as bonds

Institutional ownership and firms’ thrust to compete

This article provides evidence on the impact of transient (short-term) institutional investors on a firm’s thrust to compete. A firm’s thrust to compete, as an attribute of corporate culture, captures the relative importance of corporate values that push a firm to achieve shareholder value in the short-term by emphasizing goal achievement, fast response to external information, and enhanced competitiveness. We find that greater ownership by transient investors results in firms intensifying their future thrust to compete, suggesting that firms respond to these investors’ preferences and competitive pressures for achieving short-term value creation. In line with our expectations, this effect is not observed for firms with greater ownership by long-horizon institutional investors, who are incentivized to place their emphasis on long-term firm value, over short-term gains. Our findings reveal that the composition of institutional ownership influences the organizational culture of firms in a non-homogeneous way. As such, we provide significant empirical insights for the ongoing debate on the implications arising from the behind‐the‐scenes engagement of institutional investors with management

The unintended consequences of the launch of the single supervisory mechanism in Europe

The launch of the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) was an historic event. Beginning in Nov. 2014, the most significant banks came under the direct supervision of the European Central Bank, while national supervisory authorities maintained direct supervision of the remaining banks. Thus, supervision is conducted on two levels, which could cause inconsistency problems. Did the behavior of the significant banks differ from that of the less significant banks during the SSM launch? We find that the significant banks reduced their lending activity more than the less significant banks did in order to shrink their balance sheets and increase their capitalization