David M. Bholat

Big Data and central banks

This commentary recaps a Centre for Central Banking Studies event held at the Bank of England on 2–3 July 2014. The article covers three main points. First, it situates the Centre for Central Banking Studies event within the context of the Bank’s Strategic Plan and initiatives. Second, it summarises and reflects on major themes from the event. Third, the article links central banks’ emerging interest in Big Data approaches with their broader uptake by other economic agents.

Text Mining for Central Banks

Although often applied in other social sciences, text mining has been less frequently used in economics and in policy circles, particularly inside central banks. This Handbook is a brief introduction to the field, discussing how text mining is useful for addressing research topics of interest to central banks, and providing a step-by-step primer on how to mine text, including an overview of unsupervised and supervised techniques.

Non-Performing Loans: Regulatory and Accounting Treatments of Assets

Asset quality is an essential part of sound banking. However, asset quality is difficult for banking regulators and investors to assess in the absence of a common, cross-border scheme to classify assets. Currently no standard is applied universally to classify loans, the most sizable asset on many banks’ balance sheets. As a corollary, no common definition of non-performing loans (NPLs) exists. This paper documents divergences in the definition of NPLs across countries, accounting regimes, firms and data sources. The paper’s originality is in attending to the legal, accounting, statistical, economic and strategic aspects of loan loss provisioning (LLP) and NPLs, topics that are multidisciplinary by nature but have not been dealt with in the literature in an integrated fashion before. Since the 2007 Great Financial Crisis (GFC), accounting bodies and prudential regulators are increasingly focused on early recognition of credit losses and enhanced disclosure. A common approach to NPL recognition might complement these initiatives.

Sending firm messages: text mining letters from PRA supervisors to banks and building societies they regulate

Our paper analyses confidential letters sent from the Bank of England’s Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) to banks and building societies it supervises. These letters are a ‘report card’ written to firms annually, and are arguably the most important, regularly recurring written communication sent from the PRA to firms it supervises. Using a mix of methods, including a machine learning algorithm called random forests, we explore whether the letters vary depending on the riskiness of the firm to whom the PRA is writing. We find that they do. We also look across the letters as a whole to draw out key topical trends and confirm that topics important on the post-crisis regulatory agenda such as liquidity and resolution appear frequently. And we look at how PRA letters differ from the letters written by the PRA’s predecessor, the Financial Services Authority. We find evidence that PRA letters are different, with a greater abundance of forward-looking language and directiveness, reflecting the shift in supervisory approach that has occurred in the United Kingdom following the financial crisis of 2007–09.

Accounting in Central Banks

This paper examines the important but not often discussed issue of accounting in central banks. It highlights the distinguishing factors that make the financial statements of central banks unique relative to those produced by other bodies. We begin by explaining why central banks produce financial statements. We then discuss a variety of specific topics in central bank accounting. In terms of balance sheet items, we discuss banknotes, shareholders’ equity, gold, foreign exchange and financial instruments. Our discussion of the income statement then centres on profit recognition and distribution.

Peer-to-Peer Lending and Financial Innovation in the United Kingdom

Peer-to-peer (P2P) lending — direct lending between lenders and borrowers online outside traditional financial intermediaries like banks — first emerged in the United Kingdom and the world with the launch of Zopa in 2005. Our paper provides a quantitative analysis of nearly 14 million loan agreements. We lay bare the history of P2P lending from its beginning, showing the regional geography of P2P lending in the United Kingdom. We suggest that the history of P2P lending can shed light on financial innovation in general. We base our conclusions on four semi-structured interviews with the founders of the three most significant UK P2P platforms (Zopa, RateSetter, and Funding Circle).