Likelihood Of Bank Research Articles

Estimating the Risk of Financial Distress Using a Multi-Layered Governance Criterion: Insights from Middle Eastern and North African Banks

In this study, we explored the association of bank-level governance and state-level governance with the likelihood of banks’ financial distress in developing economies. Using a panel data sample of 954 bank-year observations of 106 conventional banks across 14 Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries from 2010 to 2018, we found that bank governance arrangements seemed to be negatively attributed to the probability of financial distress. We also found that the relationship of political stability with financial distress prospects is—contrary to our expectation—insignificant, whereas government effectiveness negatively influences the likelihood of financial distress. Our empirical evidence offers practical implications for bank managers, regulators, and credit rating agencies, and suggests several future research avenues that can build on our findings.

The politics of bank opacity

The distribution of power in the political system shapes the financial reporting opacity of banks. Specifically, banks located in states with senators on the Senate Banking Committee (BC senators) have greater abnormal loan loss provisions than banks in other states. The result is stronger for larger banks and banks with higher risk. In addition, BC senators have a negative effect on the likelihood of banks in their home states receiving enforcement actions, and, more importantly, this effect is stronger for more opaque banks. These findings suggest that politicians, regulators, and banks use opaque financial reporting to facilitate regulatory forbearance. Moreover, we show that opacity is a significant channel through which BC senators increase bank risk. During economic downturns, however, BC senators appear to promote bank opacity to encourage bank lending and create liquidity. Finally, the capital market does not penalize the reporting opacity of banks in states with BC senators.

Correlated Observations, the Law of Small Numbers and Bank Runs.

Empirical descriptions and studies suggest that generally depositors observe a sample of previous decisions before deciding if to keep their funds deposited or to withdraw them. These observed decisions may exhibit different degrees of correlation across depositors. In our model depositors decide sequentially and are assumed to follow the law of small numbers in the sense that they believe that a bank run is underway if the number of observed withdrawals in their sample is large. Theoretically, with highly correlated samples and infinite depositors runs occur with certainty, while with random samples it needs not be the case, as for many parameter settings the likelihood of bank runs is zero. We investigate the intermediate cases and find that i) decreasing the correlation and ii) increasing the sample size reduces the likelihood of bank runs, ceteris paribus. Interestingly, the multiplicity of equilibria, a feature of the canonical Diamond-Dybvig model that we use also, disappears almost completely in our setup. Our results have relevant policy implications.

Contingent Convertibles and their Impacts on the Optimization of the Capital Structure of Brazilian Banks Under Basel III

Banks around the world maintain excess regulatory capital, whether to minimize capitalization costs or to mitigate risks of financial difficulties. However, it was only after the financial crisis of 2008 that the quality of capital gained greater importance among international regulators, through the Third Basel Accord (Basel III), which suggested a capital structure formed of the new equity and debt hybrid instruments, that is, Contingent Convertibles (CoCos), which have the main goal of recapitalizing banks automatically when they show signs of financial difficulties. Using the continuous-time structural model developed by Koziol and Lawrenz (2012), with December 2013 as a reference, this paper analyzes the capital structure of the 10 biggest Brazilian banks in terms of total assets, comparing their current structures - with only subordinated debts - with the structure proposed in Basel III, composed solely of contingent convertibles, with a view to verifying the influence of CoCos in banks' risks and evaluating the effectiveness of this Basel III recommendation. Through the evidence obtained using the model mentioned, this paper's main contribution is in demonstrating that the use of CoCos would optimize the capital structure of banks under the restrictions of Basel III, considering these are effective. If not, the automatic recapitalization of these instruments could be used for shareholders' own benefit, thus increasing the likelihood of banks experiencing financial difficulties, which could cause a new financial crisis, like that which occurred in 2008.

Comovement and Informational Opacity

Morgan (2002) argues that in the banking sector, the inherent opacity of the intermediation process increases the likelihood of bank runs and magnifies the effects of systemic risk. Motivated by this argument, we develop and test the hypothesis that comovement, or the tendency of stock prices to move together, is explained by informational opacity. We find results consistent with this argument as banks generally have higher levels of comovement than non- banks. We then test whether informational opacity is driving the higher levels of comovement in banks and find that banks with the most opacity generally have the most comovement.

Tail Dependence in the US Banking Sector and Measures of Systemic Risk

Tail dependence among international stock markets is widely studied using measures of extremal dependence. In this study, we investigate the extremal dependence among stock prices of US bank holding companies. We find they exhibit strong dependence even in their limiting joint extremes. Motivated by this result, we derive extremal dependence-based systemic risk measures. The proposed systemic risk measures capture downturns in US stock markets, and in particular the financial industry, very well. We also develop another set of extremal dependence-based measures to rank financial institutions based on their systemic interconnectedness. By means of regression analysis we show that interconnectedness measures can be used as indicators of vulnerability to financial crisis. Finally, we identify drivers of extremal dependence in the US banking industry. Similarity between banks on key financial variables increases the likelihood of banks being asymptotically dependent, and increases the strength of asymptotic dependence. We believe the proposed measures have the potential to inform the prudential supervision of systemically important firms which is an area of interest to supervisory policy makers.

Assessing the Likelihood of Panic-Based Bank Runs

Conditional on the considered equilibrium, the probability of a bank run in the demand-deposit contract models of Bryant (1980) and of Diamond and Dybvig (1983) is either one or zero. In contrast, we establish the existence of an interval - being a strict subset of the unit-interval - of possible bank run probabilities for a two-player demand-deposit contract model where players receive independent signals about their liquidity desire from a continuous type space. As our main result we demonstrate that this interval reduces to a unique probability of a panic-based bank strictly smaller than one if and only if there exist types for which not running on the bank is a dominant action. In addition to existing models of bank runs such as, e.g., Goldstein and Pauzner (2005), our approach also provides some assessment of the likelihood of a bank run if there are no types for which not running on the bank is a dominant action. As a consequence, we can investigate the comparative statics of the likelihood of bank runs with respect to a larger range of payoff parameters than considered in previous models. Furthermore, we derive a technical result by which the findings of Morris and Shin (2005) on the dominance-solvability of binary action games with strategic complements also apply to nice games in the sense of Moulin (1984) if players' best response functions are increasing.

Monetary implications of FATF regulation of secret bank accounts to combat money laundering

PurposeThis paper aims to analyze the monetary consequences of the new restrictions imposed in February 2000 by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) on money laundering. FATF established 25 criteria based on its 40 recommendations (currently 49) to combat money laundering and the financing of terrorism. A total of 23 countries were placed on a list of Non‐Cooperative Countries and Territories (NCCTs) for not meeting most of the criteria. Several of the criteria relate to additional tightening or regulation of banking and financial secrecy in these countries. In order to be de‐listed from NCCTs, countries have started regulating their banking and financial sectors by placing restrictions on the degree of secrecy, passing tighter secrecy laws and closing loopholes in existing laws. The new regulatory measures may have money, banking and other economic implications.Design/methodology/approachPresents a theoretical model of a banking firm offering secret bank accounts to examine the impact of changing secrecy laws on deposits, interest rates, money and credit aggregates.FindingsThree different sets of results are plausible depending on the reactions of banks with regard to their deposit rate. The likelihood of banks changing this rate is examined using a profit function analysis.Originality/valueIt provides a theoretical framework for an agenda of future empirical research as researchers should emphasize the impact of tightening secrecy standards on bank deposit rates. The degree of the change in this rate may determine the magnitude and sometimes the direction of the changes in monetary variables.