Elijah Brewer

Interest-rate derivatives and bank lending

We study the relationship between bank participation in derivatives contracting and bank lending for the period June 30, 1985 through the end of 1992. Since 1985 commercial banks have become active participants in the interest-rate derivative products markets as end-users, or intermediaries, or both. Over much of this period significant changes were made in the composition of bank portfolios. We find that banks which utilized interest-rate derivatives experienced greater growth in their commercial and industrial (C&I) loan portfolios than banks which did not use these financial instruments. This result is consistent with the model of Diamond (1984) which predicts that intermediaries use of derivatives enables increased reliance on their comparative advantage as delegated monitors.

Impact of Independent Directors and the Regulatory Environment on Bank Merger Prices: Evidence from Takeover Activity in the 1990s

This article examines the primary motivation of the bank merger waves in the 1990s. Our investigation of the factors that determine bid premiums paid for target banks focuses on the importance of the financial characteristics of the targets, composition of their boards of directors, and the regulatory environment. ; The value of the target bank to the acquiring bank should reflect its present discounted value of future net cash flows. Thus, at a minimum, the bid price should be a combination of the stand-alone value of the net assets of the target bank and the net cash flows from higher-valued deposit insurance as a result of the proposed merger. Finance literature also suggests that in large transactions, such as mergers and acquisitions, the value of independent outside directors can be very important as internal governance mechanisms for protecting the interest of shareholders and help to mitigate shareholder/management agency problems. In addition, regulation could also play an important role in determining the number and type of bank merger transactions. Prior to the Riegle-Neal Act banks were restricted by federal and state laws from expanding across state lines. We examine whether bank merger prices were higher or lower as a result of these restrictions. We find a variety of interesting and important results. We find that higher performing targets, as measured by return on assets, are offered higher bid premiums. We also find that lower risk targets, as well as those that may provide some diversification benefits, are offered higher prices.> We find that changes in the regulatory environment had a significant impact on bank merger activities in general, and bank merger prices in particular. For example, merger bid premiums increased by approximately 35 percent on average from the pre- to the post-Riegle-Neal periods. Finally, consistent with the literature on non-financial firms, our results provide strong support for the proposition that during takeovers independent boards act to increase the wealth of the shareholders of target banks.

Alligators in the Swamp: the Impact of Derivatives on the Financial Performance of Depository Institutions

It has been argued that underpriced federal deposit insurance provides incentive for insured institutions to increase the value of shareholder equity by expanding into activities that shift risk onto the deposit insurer. Derivative instruments have been used by firms to change their risk exposure. Permitting firms with substantial moral hazard incentives to utilize interest-rate derivative instruments could lead to higher rather than lower exposure to risk. This article, using a sample of savings and loan associations (S&Ls), examines the proposition that involvement with interest-rate derivatives instruments increases depository institutions risk. We find that there is a negative correlation between risk and derivatives usage. In addition, S&Ls that used derivatives experienced relatively greater growth in their fixed-rate mortgage portfolios. Copyright 1996 by Ohio State University Press.

Interest Rate Risk and Equity Values of Life Insurance Companies: A GARCH-M Model

The importance of managerial decisions related to interest-sensitive cash flows has received considerable attention in the insurance literature. Consistent with the interest-sensitive nature of insurer assets and liabilities, empirical research has shown that insurer insolvency is significantly related to interest rate volatility. We investigate the interest rate sensitivity of monthly stock returns of life insurers based on a generalized autoregressive conditionally heteroskedastic in the mean (GARCH-M) model. We examine three different portfolios (equally weighted, risk-based, and size-based) with binary variables to explicitly account for varying interest rate strategies adopted by the Federal Reserve System. Results based on data for the period 1975 through 2000 indicate that life insurer equity values are sensitive to long-term interest rates and that interest sensitivity varies across subperiods and across risk-based and size-based portfolios. The results complement insolvency research that links insurer financial performance to changes in interest rates.

The Role of Monitoring in Reducing the Moral Hazard Problem Associated with Government Guarantees: Evidence from the Life Insurance Industry

State guaranty funds provide partial protection to life insurance holders in the event of an insolvency, thus creating a moral hazard problem akin to the one associated with deposit insurance in the banking industry. We find that differences across states in the financing of these government guaranty systems affects risk taking by life insurance companies (LICs). In states where taxpayers do not pay for the costs of resolving insolvencies, LICs hold portfolios with lower overall stock market risk. These portfolios, however, are characterized by higher levels of both capital and risky assets. These empirical findings have policy implications for improving monitoring of financial intermediaries receiving government liability guarantees. We also examine the effects of franchise value, size and ownership structure on portfolio risk. We find that larger LICs and LICs with more franchise value take less risk. We also find that risk decreases with insider holdings until insiders own about 25 percent of the firm and increases thereafter. This paper was presented at the Financial Institutions Centers May 1996 conference on

The Value of Banking Relationships During a Financial Crisis: Evidence from Failures of Japanese Banks

In this paper, we provide evidence on the value of banking relationships by examining the stock market valuation impact of three large bank failures in Japan in 1997 and 1998 on their clients and the clients of surviving banks. Bank failures are theorized to have adverse consequences for other firms in general, and for customers of the failed institutions in particular. Firms that are customers of the failed institution may be adversely affected because, among other things, they may lose an ongoing source of funding and need to incur the expense of search and providing financial and other information about themselves to new lenders. Hence, severance of banking ties due to a bank failure can have adverse consequences for the clients of the failed bank. In addition, firms that are not customers of the failed bank may be adversely affected because the failure may signal existing but yet unrecognized problems at other banks, ignite problems at other banks through spillover or contagion, or foretell adverse economic conditions for the economy in the region or nationwide. Unlike previous studies of this type, we examine not only the impact of bank failure announcements on the market valuation of the client firms of the failed banks, but the impact of the announcements on all firms including the clients of surviving banks. By also examining the stock valuation of the failure announcements for firms that did not have relationships with the failed institutions, we can identify any differences in the effects on clients and non-clients of the failed banks. This is particularly important when the distress or failure announcements occur in the midst of an on-going financial crisis, and therefore, can have strong implications for the viability of surviving banks and their relationships with client firms. We find that, as in previous studies, the market value of customers of the failed banks is adversely affected at the date of the failure announcements. In addition, the effects are related to the financial characteristics of the client firms and their primary banks. Firms that have greater access to alternative sources of funding experience a less severe adverse impact from bank failure announcements. Similarly, clients of banks that are more profitable, better capitalized, and have lower loan loss reserves suffer less from the failure announcements. However, we also find that these effects are not significantly different from the effects experienced by all firms in the economy. That is, the bank failures represent bad news for all firms in the economy, not just for the customers of the failed banks.

Inter-Industry Contagion and the Competitive Effects of Financial Distress Announcements: Evidence from Commercial Banks and Life Insurance Companies

Contagion usually refers to the spillover of the effects of shocks from one or more firms to other firms. Most studies of contagion limit their analysis to how shock affect firms in the same industry, or intra-industry contagion. The purpose of this paper is to explore and document the likely magnitude of inter-industry contagion. In their comprehensive study of intra-industry contagion using many individual industries Lang and Stulz (1992) argue that if contagion is not simply an informational effect it will impose a social cost on our economic system. If this is true for intra-industry contagion, then the same argument must hold for inter-industry contagion as well. We focus on inter-industry contagion effects in this paper because the vast majority of the extant literature about contagion has neglected its important potential cost to shareholders. Most of the studies on contagion attempts to differentiate between a pure contagion effect and a signaling or information-based contagion effect. An example of a pure contagion effect would be the negative effects of a bank failure spilling over to other banks regardless of the cause of the bank failure. And, an example of a signaling contagion effect would be if a bank failure is caused by problems whose revelation is correlated across banks, and the correlated banks are impacted negatively. We conduct our investigation of contagion by examining three separate announcements involving adverse information about commercial real estate portfolios. The first announcement is by a large commercial bank (the Bank of New England), the second announcement consists of a series of events--from several large banking organizations and a regulatory agency (the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency), and the third announcement is by a large life insurance company (Travelers). There are two reasons we chose these particular events. First, the events seemed to be very unusual and very significant indicators of future (and present) financial distress. Second, the events shared a common theme of financial distress caused by problems with commercial real estate portfolios. We first establish that the commercial bank announcements negatively impact the equity values of life insurance companies (and vice versa). Next, we demonstrate that the bank regulatory agency announcement negatively impacts the equity values of life insurance companies as well as commercial banks. We then explicitly test if the shareholder wealth effects are linked to a set of specific firm characteristics. Consistent with previous contagion studies, our results provide strong evidence of intra-industry contagion related wealth effects. We also find that these contagion effects, to a significant degree, can be explained by firm specific variables. This implies that the intra-industry spillover effects associated with our three events are not of the totally pure contagion variety, but have an informational component as well. We also find very strong evidence of significant inter-industry contagion-based shareholder wealth effects. Again, these contagion-based wealth effects do not appear to be purely contagion-based. Wealth effects can also be explained by such factors as geographic proximity, asset composition, liability composition, leverage, size, and regulatory expectations.

How Much Would Banks Be Willing to Pay to Become 'Too-Big-to-Fail' and to Capture Other Benefits

This paper examines an important aspect of the too-big-to-fail (TBTF) policy employed by regulatory agencies in the United States. How much is it worth to become TBTF? How much has the TBTF status added to bank shareholders wealth? Using market and accounting data during the merger boom (1991-2004) when larger banks greatly expanded their size through mergers and acquisitions, we find that banking organizations are willing to pay an added premium for mergers that will put them over the asset sizes that are commonly viewed as the thresholds for being TBTF. We estimate at least

Deregulation and the Relationship Between Bank CEO Compensation and Risk Taking

14 billion in added premiums for the nine merger deals that brought the organizations over

The impact of standby letters of credit on bank risk: A note

100 billion in total assets. These added premiums may reflect that perceived benefits of being TBTF and/or other potential benefits associated with size.