Daniel M. Covitz

Why Are Bank Profits So Persistent? The Roles of Product Market Competition, Informational Opacity, and Regional/Macroeconomic Shocks

We investigate how banking market competition, informational opacity, and sensitivity to shocks have changed over the last three decades by examining the persistence of firm-level rents. We develop propagation mechanisms with testable implications to isolate the sources of persistence. Our analysis suggests that different processes underlie persistent performance at the high and low ends of the distribution. Our tests suggest that impediments to competition and informational opacity continue to be strong determinants of performance; that the reduction in geographic regulatory restrictions had little effect on competitiveness; and that performance remains sensitive to regional/macroeconomic shocks. The findings also suggest reasons for the recent record profitability of the industry.

Testing Conflicts of Interest at Bond Rating Agencies with Market Anticipation: Evidence that Reputation Incentives Dominate

This paper presents the first comprehensive test of whether well-known conflicts of interest at bond rating agencies importantly influence their actions. This hypothesis is tested against the alternative that rating agency actions are primarily influenced by a countervailing incentive to protect their reputations as delegated monitors. These two hypotheses generate a number of testable predictions regarding the anticipation of credit-rating downgrades by the bond market, which we investigate using a new data set of about 2,000 credit rating migrations from Moodys and Standard & Poors, and matching issuer-level bond prices. The findings strongly indicate that rating changes do not appear to be importantly influenced by rating agency conflicts of interest but, rather, suggest that rating agencies are motivated primarily by reputation-related incentives.

Securitization Markets and Central Banking: An Evaluation of the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility

In response to the near collapse of US securitization markets in 2008, the Federal Reserve created the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, which offered non-recourse loans to finance investors’ purchases of certain highly rated asset-backed securities. We study the effects of this program and find that it lowered interest rate spreads for some categories of asset-backed securities but had little impact on the pricing of individual securities. These findings suggest that the program improved conditions in securitization markets but did not subsidize individual securities. We also find that the risk of loss to the US government was small.

Market discipline in banking reconsidered: the roles of deposit insurance reform, funding manager decisions and bond market liquidity

This paper demonstrates that the risk sensitivity of a banking organizations subordinated debt yield spreads may understate the potential for market discipline in some periods and overstate in others because such spreads contain liquidity premiums that are driven, in part, by the risk-sensitivity of funding manager decisions. Once such decisions are accounted for, new evidence is provided that indicates that subordinated debt spreads were sensitive to organization-specific risks in the mid-1980s, and that the risk- sensitivity of such spreads was about the same in the pre- and post-FDICIA periods. These results resolve some anomalies in the existing literature. In addition, it is argued that mandating the regular issuance of subordinated debt would, by reducing the endogeneity of liquidity premiums, improve the information content of both primary and secondary market debt spreads, thereby augmenting both direct and indirect market discipline.

Monitoring, Moral Hazard, and Market Power: A Model of Bank Lending

We model the relationship between market power and both loan interest rates and bank risk without placing strong restrictions on the moral hazard problems between borrowers and banks and between banks and a government guarantor. Our results suggest that these relationships hinge on intuitive parameterizations of the overlapping moral hazard problems. Surprisingly, for lending markets with a high degree of borrower moral hazard but limited bank moral hazard, we find that banks with market power charge lower interest rates than competitive banks. We also find that competition makes banking industry risk highly sensitive to macroeconomic fluctuations by making banks more vulnerable to borrower moral hazard. This finding offers an explanation for the dramatic rise and subsequent decline in bank failure rates during the 1980s and 1990s.

The Timing of Debt Issuance and Rating Migration: Theory and Evidence.

This paper develops and tests a recursive model of debt issuance and rating migration. We examine a signaling game with firms who have private information about their probability distribution of future rating migration. A key assumption of the model is that rating agencies reveal information over time, creating a recursive information problem, which in turn generates an adverse selection problem in debt issuance similar to that for equity issuance in Myers and Majluf (1984). This adverse selection model predicts that debt issuance provides a negative signal of rating migration, and that the signal strengthens with economic downturns. Another prediction regarding the maturity of debt issuance is that long maturity debt sends a negative signal relative to short maturity debt (Flannery 1986). Using data from 1980 to 1998 on straight bond issuance and Moodys ratings, and controlling for firm and issue-specific factors, we find that debt issuance sends a negative signal of a firms default probability, and that this signal intensifies with a decline in economic activity and with an increase in debt maturity.

Market Discipline in Banking Reconsidered: The Roles of Funding Manager Decisions and Deposit Insurance Reform

We find that the risk-sensitivity of bank holding company subordinated debt spreads at issuance increased with regulatory reforms that were designed to reduce conjectural government guarantees, but declined somewhat with subsequent reforms that were aimed in part at reducing regulatory forbearance. In addition, we test and find evidence for a straightforward form of market discipline: The extent to which bond issuance penalizes relatively risky banks. Evidence for such discipline only appears in the periods after conjectural government guarantees were reduced.

Are Longer Bankruptcies Really More Costly

We test the widely held assumption that longer restructurings are more costly. In contrast to earlier studies, we use instrumental variables to control for the endogeneity of restructuring time and creditor return. Instrumenting proves critical to our finding that creditor recovery rates increase with duration for roughly 1½ years following default, but decrease thereafter. This, and similar results using the likelihood of reentering bankruptcy, suggest that there may be an optimal time in default. Moreover, the default duration of almost half of our sample is well outside the optimal default duration implied by our estimates. We also find that creditors benefit from more experienced judges and from oversight by only one judge. The results have implications for the reform and design of bankruptcy systems.

Do Nonfinancial Firms Use Interest Rate Derivatives to Hedge

We compile and analyze detailed information on the debt structure and interest rate derivative positions of nonfinancial firms in 2000 and 2002. We find that differences in debt structure across firms and time tend to be counterbalanced by difference in derivative positions. In particular, among derivative users, smaller firms tend to have relatively more interest rate exposure from liabilities than larger firms and tend to use derivatives that offset these exposures. Larger firms also tend to limit their interest rate exposures, but they do so through their choice of debt structure rather than with derivatives. On the other hand, we find that a large fraction of the change in derivative positions over time cannot be explained by changes in debt structure. Finally, we find no evidence that nonfinancial firms hedge interest rate exposures from their operating assets, but do not see this as supporting the hypothesis that firms use derivatives to speculate.