Essays in Banking and Finance

Essays in Banking and Finance
Author: Gang Dong
Publisher:
Total Pages: 158
Release: 2012
Genre: Banks and banking
ISBN:

This dissertation includes three essays. The first essay identifies the determinants of bank's risk contribution to systemic risk, and documents that banks with higher non-interest income (noncore activities like investment banking, venture capital and trading activities) have a higher contribution to systemic risk than traditional banking (deposit taking and lending). After decomposing total non-interest income into two components, trading income and investment banking and venture capital income, we find that both components are roughly equally related to systemic risk. These results are robust to endogeneity concerns when we use a difference-in-difference approach with the Lehman bankruptcy proxying for an exogenous shock. We also find that banks with higher trading income one-year prior to the recession earned lower returns during the recession period. No such significant effect was found for investment banking and venture capital income. The second essay analyzes the effect of mortgage securitization on the real economy and housing market. I estimate the dynamic response of housing risk and real GDP to shocks of mortgage securitization and banks' ownership of mortgage-backed security (MBS), and test three hypotheses suggested in the extant literature. Using structural vector autoregression (SVAR) methodology and cross-sectional analysis, I find that securitization reduces housing risk by completing the market. Interestingly, housing risk increases when commercial banks' ownership of MBS increases. This positive relationship is inconsistent with the agency view of securitization but is consistent with the neglected risk view of mortgage securitization (Gennaioli, Shleifer, and Vishny 2011). The causal inference is drawn from a quasi-experimental design using housing data of bordering CBSA regions in neighboring states with and without the passing of anti-predatory lending laws. The third essay identifies the passing of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) as an exogenous shock and uses the event study method to estimate the stock market's reaction in terms of asset price changes in the health care sector. The stock market appears to view the passing of PPACA as good news to the home care and specialty outpatient services but bad news to the medical instrument and health insurance industries. This might suggest that the existing institutional structure of the insurance industry is biased against comprehensive health, and most growth opportunities exist in the home care and specialty outpatient services. Furthermore, the magnitude of the abnormal return is relatively larger for firms with higher profit and R & D investment, but smaller for firms held by healthcare-specialized institutional investors, which is consistent with the literature that price changes are partially due to information revelation efforts by sophisticated institutional investors.

Essays on Systemic Risk

Essays on Systemic Risk
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2009
Genre:
ISBN:

Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: Systemic Risk: Is the Banking Sector Special? In this paper we empirically investigate the degree of systemic risk in the banking sector versus other industry sectors in the United States and in Germany. We characterize the systemic risk in each sector by the lower tail dependence of stock returns. Our study differs from the existing literature in three aspects. First, we compare the degree of systemic risk in the banking sector with other sectors in the economy. Second, we analyze how the systemic risk depends on the state of the economy. Third, we address the problem of systemic risk in an international context by comparing the US and the German banking system. Our study shows in most cases considered that the systemic risk of the banking sector is significantly larger than in all other sectors. Especially it differs from the systemic risk in the insurance sector, the second strongly regulated financial subsystem. Moreover, the degree of systemic risk is higher under adverse market conditions. Finally, we find that the banking sector in Germany shows a lower systemic risk than the US banking sector. Chapter 3: Intra-Industry Contagion Effects of Earnings Surprises in the Banking Sector In this paper we investigate whether contagion is present in the banking sector by analyzing how banks are affected by negative earnings surprises from their competitors. The banking sector is of crucial importance for the economy and, thus, highly regulated on an individual bank level. However, a high degree of contagion risk should call for a regulation of the financial network rather than solely regulating on an individual level. To be able to make a judgment about the magnitude of possible contagion effects we compare the results of the banking sector with the results of the non-banking industries. We find that earnings surprises cause significant contagion in the banking sector. In contrast, we do not find this effect in the non-banking sector.

Essays on Risk and Uncertainty in Economics and Finance

Essays on Risk and Uncertainty in Economics and Finance
Author: Jorge Mario Uribe Gil
Publisher: Ed. Universidad de Cantabria
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2022-11-22
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 8417888756

This book adds to the resolution of two problems in finance and economics: i) what is macro-financial uncertainty? : How to measure it? How is it different from risk? How important is it for the financial markets? And ii) what sort of asymmetries underlie financial risk and uncertainty propagation across the global financial markets? That is, how risk and uncertainty change according to factors such as market states or market participants. In Chapter 2, which is entitled “Momentum Uncertainties”, the relationship between macroeconomic uncertainty and the abnormal returns of a momentum trading strategy in the stock market is studies. We show that high levels of uncertainty in the economy impact negatively and significantly the returns of a portfolio of stocks that consist of buying past winners and selling past losers. High uncertainty reduces below zero the abnormal returns of momentum, extinguishes the Sharpe ratio of the momentum strategy, while increases the probability of momentum crashes both by increasing the skewness and the kurtosis of the momentum return distribution. Uncertainty acts as an economic regime that underlies abrupt changes over time of the returns generated by momentum strategies. In Chapter 3, “Measuring Uncertainty in the Stock Market”, a new index for measuring stock market uncertainty on a daily basis is proposed. The index considers the inherent differentiation between uncertainty and the common variations between the series. The second contribution of chapter 3 is to show how this financial uncertainty index can also serve as an indicator of macroeconomic uncertainty. Finally, the dynamic relationship between uncertainty and the series of consumption, interest rates, production and stock market prices, among others, is analized. In chapter 4: “Uncertainty, Systemic Shocks and the Global Banking Sector: Has the Crisis Modified their Relationship?” we explore the stability of systemic risk and uncertainty propagation among financial institutions in the global economy, and show that it has remained stable over the last decade. Additionally, a new simple tool for measuring the resilience of financial institutions to these systemic shocks is provided. We examine the characteristics and stability of systemic risk and uncertainty, in relation to the dynamics of the banking sector stock returns. This sort of evidence is supportive of past claims, made in the field of macroeconomics, which hold that during the global financial crisis the financial system may have faced stronger versions of traditional shocks rather than a new type of shock. In chapter 5, “Currency downside risk, liquidity, and financial stability”, downside risk propagation across global currency markets and the ways in which it is related to liquidity is analyzed. Two primary contributions to the literature follow. First, tail-spillovers between currencies in the global FX market are estimated. This index is easy to build and does not require intraday data, which constitutes an important advantage. Second, we show that turnover is related to risk spillovers in global currency markets. Chapter 6 is entitled “Spillovers from the United States to Latin American and G7 Stock Markets: A VAR-Quantile Analysis”. This chapter contributes to the studies of contagion, market integration and cross-border spillovers during both regular and crisis episodes by carrying out a multivariate quantile analysis. It focuses on Latin American stock markets, which have been characterized by a highly positive dynamic in recent decades, in terms of market capitalization and liquidity ratios, after a far-reaching process of market liberalization and reforms to pension funds across the continent during the 80s and 90s. We document smaller dependences between the LA markets and the US market than those between the US and the developed economies, especially in the highest and lowest quantiles.

Essays in Financial Systemic Risk

Essays in Financial Systemic Risk
Author: Hieu Vu Dang
Publisher:
Total Pages: 139
Release: 2020
Genre: Asset-backed financing
ISBN:

In this dissertation, I study the financial systemic risk from firm-level perspectives. Chapter 1 investigates a breakdown of the total financial system risk into individual contributors and sources. Chapter 2 studies a theoretical model about the active balance sheet management of individual bank in securitization. Chapter 3 and 4 present empirical evidence about securitization asset choices of banks when they face different constraints. Chapter 5 provides a brief summary of findings in this dissertation. In chapter 1, I propose a novel systemic importance (SI) index that tracks the contribution of a financial institution to the total financial system risk. That risk measure can be decomposed into idiosyncratic and spillover risk contribution to further study the risk characteristics of each firm. Using equity return data from 1965 to 2018, I find two important results. First, the spillover risk can account for approximately 80% of the aggregate financial system risk, which emphasizes the importance of contagion risk as a major amplification mechanism of shocks during a systemic event. Second, a portfolio of the top 20 most systemically important financial institutions (SIFIs), ranked by SI index, earns a significantly lower risk-adjusted return than their counterparts. This substantial equity funding cost advantage of approximately 4% per year on average implies that the ex-ante implicit government guarantee for the “too-important-to-fail” is priced by the market. In chapter 2, I develop a theoretical model that features two benefits of securitization. First, banks can reduce idiosyncratic risks and enhance risk-absorbing capacity by converting a fraction of their risky investments into securitized assets. Second, securitized assets require less regulatory capital, helping banks obtain a higher leverage without breaking the regulation. This chapter studies effects of the two motives above, namely risk-transferring and regulatory arbitrage, on bank portfolio choices. My analytical results predict that banks would securitize safer loans and retain only higher-risk, higher-return assets that justify their regulatory capital cost. In chapter 3, I analyze new data points in the recently revamped HMDA data to examine mortgage securitization decision choices and motives of all non-exempt banks in the US. Combining with the bank-level data from Call Reports, I find that capital-constrained banks retain riskier loans and involve more in the securitization market to optimize return on capital and keep regulatory ratios in control. On the other hand, risk-constrained banks use securitization mainly for the purpose of risk and liquidity improvement. When putting together, risk transferring seems to dominate regulatory arbitrage as the main reason banks engage in securitization. Chapter 4 serves as a complementary case study to Chapter 3, in which I investigate the mortgage loan approval and securitization decision of PNC Bank. There are three interesting findings: First, the bank uses third-party automated underwriting systems to originate over 90% of its conforming residential mortgage loans and then sell more than 70% of them. Second, the bank retains safer loans on balance sheet, which emphasizes the role of securitization as a risk-transferring mechanism. Third, compared to a non-depository financial institution (shadow bank), a traditional commercial bank like PNC behaves differently and shows a clear presence of active securitization management. With a stable deposit funding channel, PNC is able to originate jumbo loans at a higher approval rate, retain more loans on balance sheet, and selectively choose to sell off riskier loans.

Essays on Financial Networks, Systemic Risk and Policy

Essays on Financial Networks, Systemic Risk and Policy
Author: Peng Sui
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2012
Genre:
ISBN:

This essay consists of three chapters. Chapter one extends Allen and Gale's (2000) model to a core-periphery network structure. We identify that the financial contagion in core-periphery structure is different to Allen and Gale (2000) in two aspects. Firstly, the shocks to the periphery bank and to the core bank have different contagion processes. Secondly, contagion not only depends on the amount of claims a bank has on a failed bank, but also on the number of links the failed neighbour has. Chapter two studies the policy effect on financial network formation when the government has time-inconsistency problem on bailing out systemically important bank. We show that if interbank deposits are guaranteed, the equilibrium network structure is different from the one under market discipline. We show that under market discipline individual banks can collectively increase the component size using interbank intermediation in order to increases the severity of systemic risk and hence trigger the bailout. If interbank intermediation is costly the equilibrium network has core-periphery structure. Chapter three follows Acharya and Yorulmazer's (2007) study of the "too many to fail" problem in a two-bank model. They argue that in order to reduce the social losses, the financial regulator finds it ex post optimal to bail out every troubled bank if they fail together, because the acquisition of liquidated assets by other investors result in a high misallocation cost. In contrast to their paper, we argue that there is no "too many to fail" bailout, unless banking capital is costly and market price sensitive. We argue that market price sensitive capital can induce banks herding and high social cost.

Three Essays on Systemic Risk

Three Essays on Systemic Risk
Author: Sylvain Benoit
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014
Genre:
ISBN:

Systemic risk has played a key role in the propagation of the last global financial crisis. A large number ofsystemic risk measures have been developed to quantify the contribution of a financial institution to thesystem-wide risk. However, numerous questions about their abilities to identify Systemically ImportantFinancial Institutions (SIFIs) have been raised since systemic risk has multiple facets, and some of themare difficult to gauge, such as the commonalities across financial institutions.The main goal of this dissertation in finance is thus (i) to propose an empirical solution to identifydomestic SIFIs, (ii) to compare theoretically and empirically different systemic risk measures, and (iii)to measure changes in banks' risk exposures.First, chapter 1 offers an adjustment of three market-based systemic risk measures, designed in a globalframework, to identify domestic SIFIs. Second, chapter 2 introduces a common framework in whichseveral systemic risk measures are expressed and compared. It is theoretically shown that those systemicrisk measures can be expressed as function of traditional risk measures. The empirical application confirmsthese findings and shows that these measures fall short in capturing the multifaceted nature of systemicrisk. Third, chapter 3 proposes the Factor Implied Risk Exposures (FIRE) methodology which breaksdown a change in risk disclosure into a market volatility component and a bank-specific risk exposurecomponent. This chapter empirically illustrates that changes in risk exposures are positively correlatedacross banks, which is consistent with banks exhibiting commonality in trading.

Essays in Banking

Essays in Banking
Author: John Sedunov (III)
Publisher:
Total Pages: 141
Release: 2012
Genre:
ISBN:

Both chapters contribute to the finance literature. Chapter two adds to an emerging literature which studies the measurement of systemic risk exposure. Moreover, it contributes to the understanding of why certain financial institutions have greater exposures to systemic risk relative to their counterparts. Chapter three adds to the literature on bank technology, soft information lending, and bank hierarchy. It answers an open question in the banking literature by examining the effects of new technology on bank operations and organization.