Emmanuelle Nys

Product Diversification in the European Banking Industry: Risk and Loan Pricing Implications

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between bank risk and product diversification in the changing structure of the European banking industry. Based on a broad set of European banks for the period 1996-2002, our study shows that banks expanding into non-interest income activities present higher risk than banks which mainly supply loans. Whereas previous studies (mainly on U.S. banks) focused on portfolio diversification effects we explore risk implications of cross-selling determinants of loan pricing as an alternative explanation. Our results show that higher income from other activities is associated with lower lending rates which suggests that banks may actually use loans as a loss leader altering default screening and monitoring activities and consequently risk pricing.

Do Bank Bondholders Price Banks’ Ability to Manage Risk/Return?

The aim of this paper is to empirically investigate the relationship between bank risk-return efficiency and bond spread priced in the primary market. Our study is based on a sample of European listed banks for the period 1996-2011. Applying a parametric frontier based on the Battese and Coelli (1993) model, we can compute risk-return efficiency score for each bank at each date. Compared to previous studies, we investigate the effectiveness of market discipline taking into account not only risk and return independently, but also the level of profitability for a given level of risk on the pricing of bond spread. We find that, over the complete sample period, bondholders require a higher spread from more inefficient banks. A closer analysis actually shows that market discipline is not effective during sound economic period, but market investors comes to discipline banks during distressed economic period by pricing lower spread to more efficient banks.In this paper, we empirically investigate whether bank bondholders value risk management, measured as risk-return efficiency (RRE), when pricing bond spreads. Based on a sample of 2,452 bonds issued by 78 European listed banks, for the period 2001–2015, we find evidence that the ability of banks to manage risk affects bond spreads: banks with more capable managers obtain a lower cost of debt. In particular our results show that bank bondholders are even more sensitive to RRE during the crisis period, for relatively poorly rated bonds, for unsecured/subordinated debt, and for long maturity debt. Our findings highlight that bondholders’ monitoring of banks is effective and takes into account the efficiency of risk management during financial and economic downturns, but during sound periods bank bondholders should strengthen their monitoring of risk management.

Philippine Rural Banks and Regional Economic Development

This paper examines the link between financial and economic development at the regional level in the Philippines and focuses on the role played by rural banks in regional economic activity. We apply cointegration panel data analysis on regional banking and economic data for the period 1993 to 2005. We ranked the sixteen regions in three different groups depending on their average economic development. The wealthiest the region is the more important financial depth is. Our results do not support a strong evident relationship between regional financial and economic development in the Philippines. However, our findings highlight a positive effect of the presence of rural banks on economic development which is stronger for the intermediate developed regions than for the less developed regions, suggesting the existence of a threshold effect.