Fabrizio Crespi

Income Diversification and Bank Performance During the Financial Crisis

Advocates of diversifying bank income sources often argue that diversification improves the resilience of banks during periods of distress. To test this proposition, we analyze the impact of income diversification on the performance of Italian banks during the recent financial crisis. Using detailed data on the composition of bank income, we show that institutions that were diversified within narrow activity classes before the crisis experienced large declines in performance during the financial crisis. By contrast, diversification across broad activity classes, such as lending and capital market activities, did not cause performance losses during the crisis. Our results support limiting banks’ ability to diversify within narrow business lines, while permitting banks to diversify across broader activity classes.

The Funding Strategies of European Banks: A Discussion

The financial turmoil occurred during the last decade has heavily affected the stability of the financial systems and the European economy. Indeed, the implications generated by the crises on the real economy, along with the important regulatory changes affecting banks, have surely had an impact on the behaviour of European banks in regards to their approach towards funding. The analysis of aggregated data for the last ten years confirms the widespread view in the literature that, at least for the largest European economies, retail deposits have acquired an increasing importance in terms of main funding instrument available to the credit institutions. Indeed, banks have progressively replaced wholesale funding in favour of deposits. Moreover, our analysis highlights a decline in the volume of bonds issued by the financial institutions over the last few years.

The Funding Strategies of Italian Banks: The Importance of Bonds

The analysis of the funding strategies adopted by the Italian banks over the last ten years confirms the trends observed for the banks operating in the major European countries. Indeed, since late 2012 deposits have been steadily growing, the weight of bonds, compared to the liabilities, has sharply declined. We find that, after a peak of 11% reached in 2011, at the end of 2016 the share of households’ wealth invested in banks’ bonds was around 3.3% only. Furthermore, until 2007 banks were used to place the majority of their bonds to households. After a steady decline throughout the years, at the end of 2016 only 25% of bank bonds appeared to be in retail investors’ portfolios. Overall, this underscores the key role played by the banks in guiding households’ investments decisions.

The Different Types of Bonds Issued by Italian Banks: An Overview

In this Chapter we provide a description regarding the characteristics of the bonds issued by Italian banks, as well as the rules governing the issuance of debt instruments. By employing data from a comprehensive database including 9,160 outstanding bonds, we show that banks, in Italy, typically issue plain vanilla bonds. Moreover, provided that the majority of bonds are unlisted, we infer that banks in Italy have been historically used to place their debt securities to retail customers directly at their branches. Finally, using real examples of debt securities currently held by retail investors, we illustrate some innovative structures of bank bonds. The complexity behind these structures suggests that retail investors are probably unaware of the implicit risks of the bonds, because they normally tend to buy (upon trust) what the bank proposes.

The Bail-in Effect: How the Cost of Funding Through Bonds has Changed After the Introduction of the BRRD

By employing data from a unique hand-collected dataset, in this Chapter we show that, since the adoption of the BRRD in the European Union, Italian banks—probably motivated by the need to increase the appeal of their bail-inable debt instruments—have been forced to offer higher yields (compared to the yields offered by government securities with corresponding maturities) to bondholders, with the consequence of an increase in their cost of funding. Finally, we conclude this final Chapter by offering some very recent examples about the application of the BRDD rules in Italy—which have either led to liquidation, resolution, or precautionary recapitalization cases—and the related side effects generated to bank bondholders.

Incapability or bad luck? Testing the 'bad management' hypothesis in the Italian banking system

Using specific evidences from the Italian banking sector and following a microeconomic approach, in this chapter we test the “bad management” hypothesis first introduced by Berger and Deyoung (1997), which suggest that poor managerial practice causes an increase in problem loans after a lag. The chapter gives a contribution to the existing literature in this field, in that it investigates nonperforming loans (NPLs) and other soured loans jointly. Our results confirm the “bad management” hypothesis, in that we discover a positive (lagged) relation between the value of past due/overdrawn loans and NPLs which, in a management perspective, indicates the incapability of the credit manager to anticipate or to recover (at least partially) problematic credits.

Using Open-End Mutual Fund Resources to Finance SMEs: The Potential Market Share of ELTIFs

The Italian asset management sector is in a rather favourable period, and open-end mutual fund AUM levels have reached a record value of 818 billion euro (+95% from 2011 to 2015). This increasing demand for open-end mutual funds from retail investors has been motivated by a search for more interesting returns under conditions of mostly zero/negative interest rates and by the decreasing dependence of commercial banks on bond funding. However, how much of these financial resources are used by mutual funds to finance SMEs? This topic should be of great interest to researchers and authorities, especially in the current period of credit-crunching and with the birth of a new investment vehicle, ELTIFs, which are specifically designed to stimulate SME financing.