Bailout Expectations Research Articles

Dueling policies: Why systemic risk taxation can fail

Two policy instruments for the banking sector are investigated, namely systemic risk taxation and constructive ambiguity about bailout policy. Bailout expectations can induce moral hazard in the form of excessive risk taking by banks. Systemic risk taxation induces banks to prefer uncorrelated investments, leading to lower systemic risk formation. Constructive ambiguity generates uncertainty about bailout prospects. However, systemic risk taxation also may inform banks about the regulator׳s concern for financial stability and thereby its bailout policy. This result leads to a trade-off between systemic risk taxation and constructive ambiguity and highlights the need to consider interdependence across policies when evaluating their effectiveness.

Public debt, bailouts, and common bonds

We look at a model where countries of different sizes provide local public goods with positive spillovers. Matching grants can give rise to optimal expenditure levels, but countries can induce bailouts. We study the characteristics of these bailouts in a subgame-perfect Nash equilibrium and how these characteristics are affected by the introduction of common bonds. Partial substitution of common for sovereign bonds has two implications. First, it lowers the average and marginal borrowing costs of countries which may be eligible for bailouts. This effect leads to higher borrowing in these countries irrespective of their bailout expectations. Second, the lower borrowing costs mitigate the incentives of countries to induce a bailout and, therefore, constrain the parameter set for which a soft budget constraint equilibrium exists. As a result, the introduction of common bonds can also be in the interest of those countries that provide the bailouts.

Determinants of Sub-Sovereign Bond Yield Spreads: The Role of Fiscal Fundamentals and Federal Bailout Expectations

Determinants of Sub-Sovereign Bond Yield Spreads: The Role of Fiscal Fundamentals and Federal Bailout Expectations

DID TARP DISTORT COMPETITION AMONG SOUND UNSUPPORTED BANKS?

This study investigates if the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) distorted price competition in U.S. banking. Political indicators reveal bailout expectations after 2009, manifested as beliefs about the predicted probability of receiving equity support relative to failing during the TARP disbursement period. In addition, the TARP affected the competitive conduct of unsupported banks after the program stopped in the fourth quarter of 2009. Loan rates were higher, and the risk premium required by depositors was lower for banks with higher bailout expectations. The interest margins of unsupported banks increased in the immediate aftermath of the TARP disbursement but not after 2010. No effects emerged for loan or deposit growth, which suggests that protected banks did not increase their market shares at the expense of less protected banks. (JEL G21, G28, L51)

Financial Sector Reform after the Subprime Crisis: Has Anything Happened? *

We analyze the reactions of stock returns and the spreads of credit default swaps (CDS) of banks from Europe and the USA to four major regulatory reforms in the aftermath of the subprime crisis, employing an event study analysis. Contrary to public perception, we find that financial markets indeed reacted to the structural reforms enacted at the national level. The reforms succeeded in reducing bail-out expectations relative to the post-bail-out period, especially for systemic banks. The strongest effects were found for the Dodd–Frank Act and in particular for the Volcker rule. Bank profitability was affected in all countries, showing up in lower equity returns.

Bank Bonuses and Bailouts

This paper shows that bonus contracts may arise endogenously as a response to agency problems within banks, and analyzes how compensation schemes change in reaction to anticipated bailouts. If there is a risk‐shifting problem, bailout expectations lead to steeper bonus schemes and even more risk taking. If there is an effort problem, the compensation scheme becomes flatter and effort decreases. If both types of agency problems are present, a sufficiently large increase in bailout perceptions makes it optimal for a welfare‐maximizing regulator to impose caps on bank bonuses. In contrast, raising managers' liability can be counterproductive.

The impact of state guarantees on banks’ ratings and risk behaviour.

State guarantees are supposed to have positive influence on banks’ ratings as they provide an additional safety net to depositors while lending the guarantor’s creditworthiness to the bank. Based hereupon, we research if and to what extent guarantees perceptibly affect market prices of securities issued by banks. Our results indicate that banks receive governmental rating subsidies of up to 7 notches depending on the region. Furthermore, literature suggests that guarantees and subsequent bailout expectations increase the risk appetite of banks enjoying this governmental support, as protected actors feel less incentivized to apply market discipline. Based hereupon, we consider the possibility of reversed causality: Is the probability of bailouts correlated to a bank’s risk taking? Analysing the drivers of governmental support for different types of banks, we find that governments are particularly willing to bail out (traditional commercial) banks with low returns on investment, or weak share performance, and a higher exposure to risk.

Rating and Financing Subsidies for Global Systemically Important Banks

State guarantees are supposed to have positive influence on banks’ ratings as they provide an additional safety net to depositors while lending the guarantor’s creditworthiness to the bank. Based hereupon, we research if and to what extend guarantees perceptibly affect market prices of securities issued by banks. Our results indicate that banks receive governmental rating subsidies of up to 7 notches depending on the region. Furthermore, literature suggests that guarantees and subsequent bailout expectations increase the risk appetite of banks enjoying this governmental support, as protected actors feel less incentivized to apply market discipline. Based hereupon, we consider the possibility of reversed causality: Is the probability of bailouts correlated to a bank’s risk taking? Analysing the drivers of governmental support for different types of banks we find that, governments particularly willing to bail out (traditional commercial) banks with low returns on investment, or weak share performance, and a higher exposure to risk.

Leverage, Systemic Risk and Financial System Health: How Do We Develop a Healthy Financial System?

The subprime crisis of 2007–2009 was the most devastating financial crisis since the Great Depression, cost the US economy trillions of dollars (see Atkinson, Luttrell and Rosenblum, 2013) and caused significant economic stress worldwide.1 In response, new financial-market regulations were adopted in many countries, including the Dodd-Frank Act in the US, which is a massively complex piece of legislation that touches most financial intermediaries in significant ways and imposes a host of new proscriptions and requirements on all sorts of intermediaries. Moreover, the crisis also required unprecedented government intervention in the financial market and the real economy, with the issuance of ex post guarantees against failure to a multitude of a priori uninsured investors and institutions, in order to stave off a complete collapse of the financial system. While there is much debate over whether the regulatory interventions were the appropriate ones (see Lo (2012), and Thakor (2013b) for detailed discussions), these interventions raise concerns about potential moral hazard insofar as expectations of future bailouts may influence present behaviour, and greater political involvement in the functioning of credit markets (see Song and Thakor, 2012).

Vertical debt spillovers in EMU countries

This article examines the extent to which subnational governments may drive sovereign risk premiums. Is subnational fiscal policy affecting the interest rates on central government bonds? Furthermore, we focus on a number of causal mechanisms that may mitigate or reinforce these upstream vertical spillovers, i.e. the presence of bailout expectations and subnational borrowing autonomy. Our findings indicate that debt accumulation by subnational governments (SNG) spills over onto sovereign risk premiums when the restrictions on SNG borrowing are weak and when investors believe that subsovereign debts are backed by the center. The results suggest that spillovers may be reduced through a proper design of a country's fiscal and institutional framework; countries should either bolster the sovereignty of subnational governments by increasing SNG fiscal autonomy, or tightening up SNG borrowing constraints.

Financial Sector Reform after the Crisis: Has Anything Happened?

We analyze the reaction of stock returns and CDS spreads of banks from Europe and the United States to four major regulatory reforms in the aftermath of the subprime crisis, employing an event study analysis. In contrast to the public perception that nothing has happened, we find that financial markets indeed reacted to the structural reforms enacted at the national level. All reforms succeeded in reducing bail-out expectations, especially for systemic banks. However, banks’ profitability was also affected, showing up in lower equity returns. The strongest effects were found for the Dodd-Frank Act (especially the Volcker rule), whereas market reactions to the German restructuring law were small.

Why banks are not too big to fail - evidence from the CDS market

This paper argues that bank size is not a satisfactory measure of systemic risk because it neglects aspects such as interconnectedness, correlation, and the economic context. In order to differentiate the effect of bank size from that of systemic importance, we control for systemic risk using the CoVaR measure introduced by Adrian and Brunnermeier (2011). We show that a bank's contribution to systemic risk has a significant negative effect on banks’ credit default swap (CDS) spreads, supporting the too‐systemic‐to‐fail hypothesis. Once we control for systemic risk, bank size (relative to gross domestic product (GDP)) has either no or a positive effect on banks’ CDS spreads. The effect of bank size increases in the home country's debt ratio and turns positive already at moderate debt ratios. This result is consistent with the too‐big‐to‐save hypothesis. We show further that the effect of systemic risk rises sharply at the onset of the financial crisis in August 2007, but weakens after the failure of Lehman Brothers, reflecting changing bailout expectations. Taken together, our results suggest that banks are not too big to fail, but they may be too systemic to fail and too big to save. — Andreas Barth and Isabel Schnabel

DOES FISCAL DISCIPLINE TOWARDS SUBNATIONAL GOVERNMENTS AFFECT CITIZENS' WELL‐BEING? EVIDENCE ON HEALTH

This paper aims to assess the impact on citizens' well-being of fiscal discipline imposed by the central government on subnational governments. Because healthcare policies involve strategic interactions between different layers of governments in many different countries, we focus on a particular dimension of well-being, namely citizens' health. We model fiscal discipline by considering government expectations of future deficit bailouts from the central government. We then study how these bailout expectations affect the expenditure for healthcare policies carried out by decentralized governments. To investigate this issue, we separate efficient health spending from inefficiencies by estimating an input requirement frontier. This allows us to assess the effects of bailout expectations on both the structural component of health expenditure and its deviations from the 'best practice'. The evidence from the 15 Italian ordinary statute regions (observed from 1993 to 2006) points out that bailout expectations do not significantly influence the position of the frontier, thus not affecting citizens' health. However, they do appear to exert a remarkable impact on excess spending.

Wall Street’s Bail-out Bet: Market Reactions to House Price Releases in the Presence of Bail-out Expectations

The rise and subsequent collapse of US house prices was one of the factors underlying the recent financial crisis. One could expect that the crisis brought increased attention to the housing market and thus led to stronger market reactions to house price news. We find that reactions indeed change, but with a peculiar twist: from September 2008 on, good news from the housing market are associated with falling US stock prices, and vice versa. The likely explanation, for which we provide cross-sectional evidence, is that falling house prices increased the market’s trust in a government bail-out, thereby increasing market valuations of firms that were expected to benefit from government rescue measures.

Wall Street’s bailout bet: Market reactions to house price releases in the presence of bailout expectations

The rise and subsequent collapse of US house prices was one of the factors underlying the recent financial crisis. One could expect that the crisis brought increased attention to the housing market and thus led to stronger market reactions to house price news. We find that reactions indeed change, but with a peculiar twist: from September 2008 on, good news from the housing market are associated with falling US stock prices, and vice versa. The likely explanation, for which we provide cross-sectional evidence, is that falling house prices increased the market’s trust in a government bailout, thereby increasing market valuations of firms that were expected to benefit from government rescue measures.

When bigger isn't better: bailouts and bank reform

Taking retail deposits and lending to SMEs and households were the traditional role of commercial banks: but banking in Britain has been transformed by increasing consolidation and by the lure of high returns available from investment banking. With appropriate changes to the Diamond and Dybvig model of commercial banking, we show how market concentration enables banks to collect ‘seigniorage’ profits; and how ‘tail risk’ investments which escape regulatory notice allow losses to be shifted onto the taxpayer. In principle, the franchise values associated with market power might assist regulatory capital requirements to check risk-taking. But when big banks act strategically, bailout expectations can undermine these disciplining devices: and the taxpayer ends up ‘on the hook’ - as in the recent crisis. Structural change is needed to prevent a repeat; and we discuss how the Vickers report proposes to protect the taxpayer by a ‘ring fence’ separating commercial and investment banking.

The Redistributive Effects of Financial Deregulation

Financial regulation is often framed as a question of economic efficiency. This paper, by contrast, puts the distributive implications of financial regulation center stage. We develop a model in which the financial sector benefits from risk-taking by earning greater expected returns. However, risktaking also increases the incidence of large losses that lead to credit crunches and impose negative externalities on the real economy. We describe a Pareto frontier along which different levels of risktaking map into different levels of welfare for the two parties. A regulator has to trade off efficiency in the financial sector, which is aided by deregulation, against efficiency in the real economy, which is aided by tighter regulation and a more stable supply of credit. We also show that financial innovation, asymmetric compensation schemes, concentration in the banking system, and bailout expectations enable or encourage greater risk-taking and allocate greater surplus to the financial sector at the expense of the rest of the economy.

The Redistributive Effects of Financial Deregulation

Financial regulation is often framed as a question of economic efficiency. This paper, by contrast, puts the distributive implications of financial regulation center stage. We develop a model in which the financial sector benefits from risk-taking by earning greater expected returns. However, risktaking also increases the incidence of large losses that lead to credit crunches and impose negative externalities on the real economy. We describe a Pareto frontier along which different levels of risktaking map into different levels of welfare for the two parties. A regulator has to trade off efficiency in the financial sector, which is aided by deregulation, against efficiency in the real economy, which is aided by tighter regulation and a more stable supply of credit. We also show that financial innovation, asymmetric compensation schemes, concentration in the banking system, and bailout expectations enable or encourage greater risk-taking and allocate greater surplus to the financial sector at the expense of the rest of the economy.

Bank Bonuses and Bail-Outs

This paper shows that bonus contracts may arise endogenously as a response to agency problems within banks, and analyzes how compensation schemes change in reaction to anticipated bail-outs. If there is a risk-shifting problem, bail-out expectations lead to steeper bonus schemes and even more risk-taking. If there is an effort problem, the compensation scheme becomes flatter and effort decreases. If both types of agency problems are present, a sufficiently large increase in bailout perceptions makes it optimal for a welfare-maximizing regulator to impose caps on bank bonuses. In contrast, raising managers’ liability can be counterproductive.

Competitive Distortions of Bank Bailouts

This study investigates if the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) distorted price competition in U.S. banking. Political indicators reveal bailout expectations after 2009, manifested as beliefs about the predicted probability of receiving equity support relative to failing during the TARP disbursement period. In addition, the TARP affected the competitive conduct of unsupported banks after the program stopped in the fourth quarter of 2009. Loan rates were higher, and the risk premium required by depositors was lower for banks with higher bailout expectations. The interest margins of unsupported banks increased in the immediate aftermath of the TARP disbursement but not after 2010. No effects emerged for loan or deposit growth, which suggests that protected banks did not increase their market shares at the expense of less protected banks.