Bailout Expectations Research Articles

Risk-return tradeoff and serial correlation in the Chinese stock market: A bailout-driven crash feedback hypothesis

This paper explores two puzzling phenomena about aggregate stock market behavior: the weak mean–variance (risk-return) relation and return autocorrelation. Existing literature typically analyzes these two phenomena in isolation, with few attempts to understand their coexistence. To bridge this gap, we integrate two key factors, market-wide bailout guarantees and feedback trading, within the context of the Chinese stock market. We develop joint pricing formulas to theoretically show that feedback traders’ speculation on bailouts can simultaneously produce these anomalies by tying them to features typical of market crashes. Our empirical analysis, based on Chinese market data from 1997 to 2020 and a market crash index, provides consistent support for these theoretical derivations. The results highlight the significant role of speculation driven by bailout expectations in influencing aggregate stock market dynamics. Accordingly, this also illuminates the necessity for further research on the extensive pricing implications of both government intervention and speculative trading.

Larry Ball’s The Fed and Lehman Brothers: A Review Essay

Laurence Ball argues that the Federal Reserve (the Fed) could—and should—have bailed out Lehman Brothers so that it did not have to declare bankruptcy. He presents compelling evidence that it could have. I argue that the view that the Fed should not bail out Lehman is reasonable under the circumstances the Fed was in at the time. The Lehman bankruptcy is a case study in bailouts and the attendant moral hazard problem that expectations of bailouts create. The lessons learned imply a clear case for appropriate regulatory intervention to solve the problems created when governments cannot commit themselves to not undertake bailouts. (JEL D72, E32, E58, E63, G01, G24, G33)

Reputation, Bailouts, and Interest Rate Spread Dynamics

We propose a joint theory for interest rate dynamics and bailout decisions. Interest rate spreads are driven by time-varying fundamentals and expectations of future bailouts. Private agents are uncertain about the government's willingness to bail out and learn by observing its actions. The model provides an explanation for why we observe governments initially refusing to bail out borrowers at the beginning of a crisis even if they eventually end up providing a bailout after the crisis aggravates. The typical equilibrium outcome displays hump-shaped spreads and contagion as was the case in the US financial and European debt crises. (JEL E43, G01, G21, H63, H81)

The economics of banking regulation in Europe: does the post-GFC bail-in regime effectively eliminate implicit government guarantees?

This paper assesses the market effects of regulatory events associated with the implementation of a bail-in regime for failing European banks. The bail-in regime was designed to make banks efficiently resolvable in order to abolish Implicit Government Guarantees (IGGs). We use a seemingly-unrelated-regressions framework to estimate the effects on Credit Default Swap (CDS) spreads and equity returns of key events associated with the two cornerstones of the European bail-in regime, the Bank Recovery & Resolution Directive (BRRD) and the Single Resolution Mechanism Regulation (SRM-R), and other relevant events. Contrary to the regulations’ objectives, we find that regulatory events associated with the implementation of BRRD and SRM-R led to tighter CDS spreads and higher equity returns over the 2009–2017 period. The pattern varies with bank heterogeneity and is particularly pronounced for global systemically important banks (G-SIBs), i.e. banks whose systemic risk profile is deemed to be of such importance that the bank's failure would trigger a wider financial crisis and threaten the global economy, suggesting that the regime does not effectively solve the systemic problem of bailout expectations in the European banking sector.

Debt holder monitoring and implicit guarantees: Did the BRRD improve market discipline?

This paper argues that the European Union’s Banking Recovery and Resolution Directive (BRRD) has improved market discipline in the European bank market for unsecured debt. The different impact of the BRRD on bank bonds provides a quasi-natural experiment that allows us to study the effects of the BRRD within banks using a difference-in-difference approach. Identification is based on the fact that (otherwise identical) bonds of a given bank maturing before 2016 are explicitly protected from BRRD bail-in. The empirical results are consistent with the hypothesis that debt holders actively monitor banks and that the BRRD diminished bailout expectations after its enactment. Bank bonds subject to BRRD bail-in carry a 13-basis points bail-in premium in terms of the yield spread, driven by low capitalization. Banks that respond to market pressure by de-risking their portfolios are able to secure cheaper funding for instruments that are subject to bail-in.

What Can Volatility Smiles Tell Us About the Too Big to Fail Problem?

This paper exploits the information content of option markets to offer fresh insight into the Too-Big-to-Fail (TBTF) problem for banks. I employ option prices to construct a forward-looking measure of bank exposure to significant price drops (i.e. tail-risk) and explore cross-sectional differences between large banks with at least $50B in assets identified as systemically important and smaller banks. I document a permanent increase in the average tail-risk of the U.S. banking industry as a whole following the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), except for banks above the $50B size threshold. I argue that the stark post-crisis difference in tail-risk for banks above and below the $50B threshold is consistent with the notion that the TBTF status of above 50B banks was reinforced by the series of bailouts targeted at them during the crisis and their subsequent designation as systemically important by the Dodd-Frank Act. This in turn raised investor expectations of future bailouts for above 50B banks and reduced their perceived exposure to downside risk as captured by the tail-risk measure.

Implementing a European Bail-In Regime: Do BRRD & SRM-R Effectively Eliminate Implicit Government Guarantees in the European Banking Sector? An Empirical Analysis

During the last decade, policymakers have implemented a European bank resolution regime, which includes the Bank Recovery & Resolution Directive and the Single Resolution Mechanism Regulation, designed to make banks resolvable and to abolish bailout expectations, i.e. implicit government guarantees (IGGs). The regime strives to make banks’ debt bail-in-able and to make government bailouts of banks the rare exception. The overall research objective of this paper is to measure the effectiveness of this regime in terms of bailout expectations in the form of funding advantages. Specifically, we examine market reactions to regime implementation, using an event- study framework to quantify the impact of key legal events on credit default swap (CDS) spreads and equity returns. We control for a wide range of variables to address endogeneity concerns raised with regard to omitted variables in prior work. Our uni-variate and multivariate analysis results suggest that the European bail-in regime alone does not effectively eliminate IGGs. On the contrary, CDS spreads, especially among global systemically important banks, are tightening and equity returns are increasing. This indicates that the regime inadequately solves the systemic problem of bailout expectations in the market.

Government Support and Bank Wholesale Funding Costs: Evidence from the EU Banking Union

In the wake of the financial crisis, many governments intervened to rescue banks. Between 2007 and 2009, numerous State Aid schemes were notified to the European Commission by different Member States; only 11 were blocked. Since the crisis, European authorities have reformed their safety nets to avoid taxpayers having to step in to save banks and out of fear that bailouts may be distorting competition. We investigate whether this fear is warranted in relation to long-term wholesale funding since the EU reforms. Using an original cross-section of nearly 2,500 senior bonds issued by systemic European banks, we find that nationalized banks do not benefit from lower bond spreads compared to their peers. Our findings are identical when we instrument bail-out expectations, consistent with these expectations having dropped since the crisis. We conclude that, in good times, the new EU bank safety nets appear to have achieved their stated goals.

Bailouts and systemic insurance

Abstract We revisit the link between bailouts and bank risk taking. Bailout expectations create moral hazard – increase bank risk taking. However, when an individual bank’s success depends on both its effort and the overall stability of the banking system, bailouts that shield banks from contagion may increase their incentives to invest prudently and so reduce bank risk taking. This systemic insurance effect is more important when bailout rents are low while contagion risk is high. The optimal policy is then to make bailouts not difficult, but “effective” : associated with lower rents. We further show that, besides better bank resolution, a powerful means to reduce bailout rents is higher ex ante bank capital, since it implies a larger bank equity cushion that can be expropriated in a resolution. This highlights an important complementarity between bank capital regulation and bailouts as tools to enhance financial stability.

Are Transfer-Dependent Governments More Creditworthy? Reassessing the Fiscal Federal Foundations of Subnational Default Risk

AbstractMany fiscal federal scholars argue, often implicitly, that transfer dependence generally bolsters subnational creditworthiness by signalling a higher likelihood of national bailouts for distressed governments. This article argues that dependence fails to bestow general benefits on local borrowers because it suggests an inability to generate additional revenues in the event of fiscal distress, and because this inability does not, contrary to the expectations of many, necessarily translate into higher bailout expectations. Ultimately it is the nature, not the level, of transfers that affects local creditworthiness, whether through bailout or non-bailout channels. Stable and predictable payments, including robust equalization systems, support local creditworthiness, while volatile and unpredictable transfers do not. The article supports these arguments with a review of documents issued by the major international credit rating agencies and cross-national statistical analyses of bailout probabilities and standalone credit ratings issued by Moody’s Investors Service. It also discusses the implications of the findings for work on the fiscal discipline of subnational governments.

Debt Holder Monitoring and Implicit Guarantees: Did the BRRD Improve Market Discipline?

This paper argues that the European Unions Banking Recovery and Resolution Directive (BRRD) improved market discipline in the European bank market for unsecured debt. The different impact of the BRRD on bank bonds provides a quasi-natural experiment that allows to study the effect of the BRRD within banks using a difference-in-difference approach. Identification is based on the fact that (otherwise identical) bonds of a given bank maturing before 2016 are explicitly protected from BRRD bail-in. The empirical results are consistent with the hypothesis that debt holders actively monitor banks and that the BRRD diminished bail-out expectations. Bank bonds subject to BRRD bail-in carry a 10 basis points bail-in premium in terms of the yield spread. While there is some evidence that the bail-in premium is more pronounced for non-GSIB banks and banks domiciled in peripheral European countries, weak capitalization is the main driver. JEL Classification: G18, G21, H81

Financing as a supply chain: The capital structure of banks and borrowers

We develop a model of the joint capital structure decisions of banks and their borrowers. Bank leverage of 85% or higher emerges because bank seniority both dramatically reduces bank asset volatility and incentivizes risk-taking by producing a skewed return distribution. Nonfinancial firms choose low leverage to protect their banks, presenting a partial resolution to the low-leverage puzzle. Our setup naturally extends to include government actions as we model bank assets using a modified Basel framework. Deposit insurance and bailout expectations lead banks and borrowers to take on more risk. Capital regulation lowers bank leverage but can increase bank risk due to a compensating increase in borrower leverage. Despite this, doubling current capital requirements reduces bank default risk by up to 90%, with only a small increase in loan interest rates.

Are European Banks Still Too-Big-to-Fail? The Impact of Government Interventions and Regulatory Reform on Bailout Expectations in the EU

I investigate the implications of government interventions and regulatory reform on too-big-too-fail expectations in the European banking sector. Evidence from stock returns over the period 1993 to 2016 suggests that large European banks have long benefitted and continue to benefit from implicit government guarantees. I document that investors are willing to accept lower risk-adjusted returns for large bank stocks relative to small bank stocks, because they anticipate that governments absorb part of these stocks’ downside risk during financial crises. Recent regulatory reform introducing bail-in and a common standardized resolution framework for European banks were successful in reducing implicit guarantees at first, but became less credible after the effective implementation of these rules came into question in early 2016.

Bank risk, bank bailouts and sovereign capacity during a financial crisis: a cross-country analysis

This paper analyzes the competitive effects of government bailout expectations on bank risk using a sample of banks in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries from 2005 to 2015. We verify that, ordinarily, the bailout expectations of a given bank increase its competitors’ risk. During a crisis, however, this effect is mitigated, ie, banks with more protected competitors reduce their risk in relation to banks with less protected competitors. We also show that in countries with higher sovereign risk (a lower capacity to bail out banks), the effect of competitors’ protection on bank risk during a crisis is smaller, which is consistent with the idea that bailing out protected banks becomes less credible in these countries during turbulent times. Taken together, these results suggest that the bailout expectations of competing banks put pressure on bank margins and lead to more risk in normal times, whereas market-disciplining forces become stronger for banks with protected competitors during a crisis, forcing them to reduce risks.

DOES THE SAMARITAN'S DILEMMA MATTER? EVIDENCE FROM U.S. AGRICULTURE

The Samaritan's dilemma posits a downside to charity: recipients may rely on free aid instead of their own efforts. Anecdotally, the expectation of free assistance is thought to be important for decisions about insurance and risky behavior in numerous settings, but reliable empirical evidence is scarce. We estimate whether the Samaritan's dilemma exists in U.S. agriculture, where both private crop insurance and frequent federal disaster assistance are present. We find that bailout expectations are qualitatively and quantitatively important for the insurance decision. Furthermore, aid expectations reduce both expenditure on farm inputs and subsequent crop revenue. (JEL D72, H84, Q18)

Bank rescues and bailout expectations: The erosion of market discipline during the financial crisis

We design a novel test for changes in market discipline based on the relation between firm-specific risk, credit spreads, and equity returns. We use our method to analyze the evolution of bailout expectations during the recent financial crisis. We find that bailout expectations peaked in reaction to government interventions following the failure of Lehman Brothers, and returned to pre-crisis levels following the initiation of the Dodd-Frank Act. We do not find such changes in market discipline for nonfinancial firms. Finally, market discipline is weaker for government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) and systemically important banks (SIBs) than for investment banks.

Determinants of sub-sovereign bond yield spreads – The role of fiscal fundamentals and federal bailout expectations

This paper investigates how bailout expectations affect the extent to which yield spreads for bonds issued by sub-sovereign entities within fiscal federations price in fundamentals related to default risk. The question is analysed both across and within federations using a novel dataset for sub-sovereign governments that includes Australian states, Canadian provinces, Swiss cantons, German Länder, US states, Spanish communities, and Indian states. The paper finds that sub-sovereign debt and deficit levels relative to GDP are important drivers of sub-sovereign spreads. However, the weight assigned by financial markets to fundamentals when pricing sub-sovereign bonds is reduced when the institutional set-up of the federation allows for bailouts. Moreover, within federations, the market’s expectation of a federal bailout and the capacity of the federal government to provide support to the weaker members of the federation similarly affect the extent to which fundamental factors are priced into spreads. The paper shows that the positive link between debt and risk premia tends to break down when sub-sovereign government debt rises above certain thresholds. This could reflect the market’s expectation of a federal bailout as fundamentals deteriorate. Additionally, larger sub-sovereign entities tend to pay higher premia as fundamentals worsen which could be linked to the limited capacity of the federal government to provide support as the size of the expected bailout increases. A pattern of rising risk premia as fundamentals worsen is also found for sub-sovereign entities when the central government faces borrowing constraints.

Revisiting Dodd-Frank

Dodd-Frank is a sprawling law, many pieces of which are unrelated to any financial crisis — past or future. What unifies the disparate pieces is an unquestioning faith in regulatory omniscience and broad grants of power to these infallible regulators. The law calls on regulators to step in where the rest of us — individuals, firms, and nongovernmental institutions — are supposedly destined to fail, namely, to identify and address all systemic and a wide array of nonsystemic risks. In giving such heavy responsibilities to regulators, Dodd-Frank’s drafters overlooked the fact that precrisis regulators missed risks and that precrisis regulatory design contributed to the buildup of risk. By giving regulators an outsized role, Dodd-Frank suppresses the market’s intrinsic disciplining mechanisms and builds bailout expectations. Revisiting Dodd-Frank thus requires a marked change in perspective — a shift away from the comforting but ineffective “entrust the financial system to the skilled hands of the all-knowing regulators” approach to financial regulation, as well as a piece-by-piece substantive overhaul.

Credible Losers: A Regulatory Design for Prudential Market Discipline

Those who lend money typically take steps to protect against or compensate themselves for the risk the borrower will default. These steps — such as charging higher rates of interest for riskier loans — can affect borrowers’ activities in salutary ways. Lenders thus “discipline” borrowers to rein in risk. This type of market discipline can be an important supplement to regulatory efforts to ensure that banks and other financial firms do not take imprudent risks that wind up costing taxpayers or destabilizing the financial system. For lenders to serve as disciplinarians, however, they must expect to bear losses if the borrower becomes insolvent. If lenders believe the government will “bail out” an insolvent borrower, they will not expect to bear losses, and will have little incentive to monitor or discipline the borrower. Because of this, market discipline of the largest financial firms, where bailout expectations persist, is broken. It is not enough for regulators to say that they will impose losses on some class of creditors to reset the creditors’ expectations: such promises must be credible. I refer in this Article to lenders who expect to bear losses in the event of default as “credible losers.” Establishing credible losers among the claimants on systemically important financial institutions poses a knotty challenge. This Article offers a framework for meeting this challenge by articulating three criteria for establishing credible losers in support of prudential aims. It then applies the framework to evaluate a new proposed rule that largely meets these criteria for the largest financial institutions in the United States. The proposed rule can be understood to require these firms to issue a type of debt that converts to equity upon the failure and resolution of the firm. The Article then points to gaps in the rule’s coverage and proposes two possible ways to fill these gaps. First, debt that converts to equity prior to insolvency or resolution may help create market discipline for financial behemoths to which the rule does not apply. Although a European experiment with such “contingent convertible” (CoCo) debt has been problematic, the disciplinary role of such instruments may be strengthened by improving their design and clarifying their regulatory treatment. Second, “side bets” — in the form of credit default swaps or prediction markets — may help establish “credible losers” where the rule fails to do so.

Debt Holder Monitoring and Implicit Guarantees: Did the BRRD Improve Market Discipline?

This paper argues that the introduction of the Banking Recovery and Resolution Directive (BRRD) improved market discipline in the European bank market for unsecured debt. The different impact of the BRRD on bank bonds provides a quasi-natural experiment that allows to study the effect of the BRRD within banks using a difference-in-difference approach. Identification is based on the fact that (otherwise identical) bonds of a given bank maturing before 2016 are explicitly protected from BRRD bail-in. The empirical results are consistent with the hypothesis that debt holders actively monitor banks and that the BRRD diminished bail-out expectations. Bank bonds subject to BRRD bail-in carry a 10 basis points bail-in premium in terms of the yield spread. While there is some evidence that the bail-in premium is more pronounced for non-GSIB banks and banks domiciled in peripheral European countries, weak capitalization is the main driver.