Bank reactions after capital shortfalls

This paper investigates whether European banks have capital targets and how deviations from the target impact their equity composition and activity mix. Using quarterly data for a sample of large European banks between 2004 and 2011, we show that there are notable asymmetries in banks’ reactions to deviations from optimal capital levels. Banks prefer to reshuffle risk-weighted assets or increase asset holdings when being above their optimal Tier 1 ratio, whereas they rather try to increase equity levels or reshuffle risk-weighted assets without changing asset holdings when being below target. At the same time, focusing instead on a unweighted equity ratio target, we find evidence of deleveraging and lower loan growth for undercapitalized banks during the recent financial crisis, whereas in the pre-crisis periods banks primarily reacted to deviations from their optimal target by adjusting equity levels

Some borrowers are more equal than others: Bank funding shocks and credit reallocation. National Bank of Belgium, Working Paper No. 361

This paper provides evidence on the strategic lending decisions made by banks facing a negative funding shock. Using bank-firm level credit data, we show that banks reallocate credit within their loan portfolio in at least three different ways. First, banks reallocate to sectors where they have a high market share. Second, they also reallocate to sectors in which they are more specialized. Third, they reallocate credit towards low-risk _rms. These reallocation effects are economically large. A standard deviation increase in sector market share, sector specialization or firm soundness reduces the transmission of the funding shock to credit supply by 22, 8 and 10 %, respectively

Identifying credit supply shocks with bank-firm data: methods and applications. National Bank of Belgium, Working Paper No. 347

Current empirical methods to identify and assess the impact of bank credit supply shocks rely strictly on multi-bank firms and ignore firms borrowing from only one bank. Yet, these single-bank firms are often the majority of firms in an economy and most prone to credit supply shocks. We propose and underpin an alternative demand control (using industry-location-size-time fixed effects) that allows identifying timevarying cross-sectional bank credit supply shocks using both single- and multi-bank firms. Using matched bank-firm credit data from Belgium, we show that firms borrowing from banks with negative credit supply shocks exhibit lower financial debt growth, asset growth, investments, and operating margin growth. Positive credit supply shocks are associated with bank risk-taking behaviour at the extensive margin. Importantly, to capture these effects it is crucial to include the single-bank firms when identifying the bank credit supply shocks

Identifying credit supply shocks with bank-firm data:Methods and applications

Current empirical methods to identify and assess the impact of bank credit supply shocks rely strictly on multi-bank firms and ignore firms borrowing from only one bank. Yet, these single-bank firms are often the majority of firms in an economy and most prone to credit supply shocks. We propose and underpin an alternative demand control (using industry–location–size–time fixed effects) that allows identifying time-varying cross-sectional bank credit supply shocks using both single- and multi-bank firms. Using matched bank-firm credit data from Belgium, we show that firms borrowing from banks with negative credit supply shocks exhibit lower financial debt growth, asset growth, investments, and operating margin growth. Positive credit supply shocks are associated with bank risk-taking behaviour at the extensive margin. Importantly, to capture these effects it is crucial to include the single-bank firms when identifying the bank credit supply shocks

Bank competition and stability: Cross-country heterogeneity

This paper documents large cross-country variation in the relationship between bank competition and bank stability and explores market, regulatory and institutional features that can explain this variation. We show that an increase in competition will have a larger impact on banks’ fragility in countries with stricter activity restrictions, lower systemic fragility, better developed stock exchanges, more generous deposit insurance and more effective systems of credit information sharing. The effects are economically large and thus have important repercussions for the current regulatory reform debate

Zombification in Europe in times of pandemic

Large-scale government and central bank interventions in the context of the COVID-19 crisis have reinvigorated the debate on the threat of a zombification of the economy if unviable firms are kept alive. This column surveys the existing literature and argues that the COVID-19 crisis is very different from previous experience. It proposes a number of policy actions that can prevent a zombification of the economy

Banks and negative interest rates

In this paper, we survey the nascent literature on the transmission of negative policy rates. We discuss the theory of how the transmission depends on bank balance sheets, and how this changes once policy rates become negative. We review the growing evidence that negative policy rates are special because the pass-through to banks' retail deposit rates is hindered by a zero lower bound. We summarize existing work on the impact of negative rates on banks' lending and securities portfolios, and the consequences for the real economy. Finally, we discuss the role of different "initial" conditions when the policy rate becomes negative, and potential interactions between negative policy rates and other unconventional monetary policies

Life below zero: Bank lending under negative policy rates

We show that negative policy rates affect the supply of bank credit in a novel way. Banks are reluctant to pass on negative rates to depositors, which increases the funding cost of high-deposit banks, and reduces their net worth, relative to low-deposit banks. As a consequence, the introduction of negative policy rates by the European Central Bank in mid-2014 leads to more risk taking and less lending by euro-area banks with greater reliance on deposit funding. Our results suggest that negative rates are less accommodative, and could pose a risk to financial stability, if lending is done by high-deposit banks

Liquidation value and loan pricing

We show that the liquidation value of collateral depends on who is pledging it. We employ transaction-level data on overnight repurchase agreements (repo) and loan-level credit registry data on corporate loans. We find that borrowers on the repo market pay a 2.6 basis points rate premium when their default risk is positively correlated with the risk of the collateral that they pledge. The premium in corporate loan markets amounts to 25 basis points. Our results imply that liquidation value contains a component at the borrower-collateral level, and that lenders monitor and price-in the interdependency between borrower and collateral risk