Klaus Schaeck

Are More Competitive Banking Systems More Stable

This paper provides the first empirical analysis of the cross-country relationship between a direct measure of competitive conduct of financial institutions and banking system fragility. Using the Panzar and Rosse H-Statistic as a measure for competition in 38 countries during 1980-2003, we present evidence that more competitive banking systems are less prone to systemic crises and that time to crisis is longer in a competitive environment. Our results hold when concentration and the regulatory environment are controlled for and are robust to different methodologies, different sampling periods, and alternative samples.

Competition, Efficiency, and Soundness in Banking: An Industrial Organization Perspective

How can competition enhance bank soundness? Does competition improve soundness via the efficiency channel? Do banks heterogeneously respond to competition? To answer these questions, we exploit an innovative measure of competition [Boone, J., A new way to measure competition, EconJnl, Vol. 118, pp. 1245-1261] that captures the reallocation of profits from inefficient banks to their efficient counterparts. Based on two complementary datasets for Europe and the U.S., we first establish that the new competition indicator captures a broad variety of other characteristics of competition in a consistent manner. Second, we verify that competition increases efficiency. Third, we present novel evidence that efficiency is the conduit through which competition contributes to bank soundness. In a final examination of banks’ heterogeneous responses to competition, we find that smaller banks’ soundness measures respond more strongly to competition than larger banks’ soundness measures, and two-stage quantile regressions indicate that the soundness-enhancing effect of competition is larger in magnitude for sound banks than for fragile banks.

How Well Do Aggregate Bank Ratios Identify Banking Problems

The paper provides an empirical analysis of aggregate banking system ratios during systemic banking crises. Drawing upon a wide cross-country dataset, we utilize parametric and nonparametric tests to assess the power of these ratios to discriminate between sound and unsound banking systems. We also estimate a duration model to investigate whether the ratios help determine the timing of a banking crisis. Despite some weaknesses in the available data, our findings offer initial evidence that some indicators are precursors for the likelihood and timing of systemic banking problems. Nevertheless, we caution against sole reliance on these indicators and advocate supplementing them with other tools and techniques.

The Effects of Government Interventions in the Financial Sector on Banking Competition and the Evolution of Zombie Banks

We investigate how government interventions such as blanket guarantees, liquidity support, recapitalizations, and nationalizations affect banking competition. This issue is critical for stability, access to finance, and economic growth. Exploiting cross-country and cross-time variation in the timing of interventions and accounting for their non-randomness, we document that liquidity support, recapitalizations, and nationalizations trigger large increases in competition. We also find some more nuanced evidence that zombie banks’ market shares in crisis countries evolve together with interventions. A higher frequency of interventions coincides with greater zombie bank presence, and increases in competition are larger when zombie banks occupy bigger market shares.

Bank Market Structure, Competition, and Stability: Issues and Concepts

A perceived simultaneous increase in consolidation and competition in banking systems around the world has intensified public policy debates on the nexus between consolidation and competition on one hand, and bank soundness on the other hand. In light of these developments, this paper reviews and evaluates the contemporary literature on the effect of structural and nonstructural measures of competition on bank soundness. While the established literature points toward negative trade-offs between competition and bank soundness, this review concludes that recent studies increasingly bolster the view that competition is beneficial for bank stability. This paper starts out with a survey of key studies from the literature on competition, concentration, and soundness. I then provide an assessment of the underlying concepts in the industrial organization literature and review alternatives to the Structure-Conduct-Performance paradigm that dominates the extant literature. Second, I point out several issues that have been widely ignored in contemporary studies but that are critical for public policy recommendations. Finally, I suggest some avenues for future research.

The real effects of regulatory enforcement actions : evidence from U.S. counties

We present a novel way to examine macro-financial linkages by focusing on the real effects of bank supervisors’ enforcement actions. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in supervisory monitoring intensity, we show that enforcement actions in single-market banks trigger temporarily large adverse effects for the macroeconomy by reducing personal income growth, the number of establishments, and increasing unemployment. These effects are related to contractions in bank lending and liquidity creation, and are more pronounced when we consider enforcement actions on both single-market and multi-market banks, and in counties with fewer banks and greater external financial dependence.

‘Too Systemically Important to Fail’ in Banking

The recent financial turmoil and bailouts of a large number of banks have raised substantial policy concerns regarding banks that are considered ‘Too-systemically-important-to-fail’ (TSITF). In this paper, we exploit a sample of bank mergers and acquisitions (M&As) between 1997 and 2008 in nine EU economies and use an innovative setup derived from the frontier literature to capture safety net subsidy effects and evaluate their ramifications for systemic risk. We focus on three closely related phenomena: First, we use frontier methods to extract information on whether banks deliberately pay premiums for being considered TSITF. Second, we incorporate the safety net subsidies derived from the frontier methods in a probit model to assess whether they affect the probability of a bank being rescued during the recent crisis. We find that safety net benefits derived from M&A activity have a significantly positive association with the rescue probability, suggesting the moral hazard issue in banking systems pre-crisis. Third, we do not find that gaining safety net subsidies leads to TSITF bank’s increased interdependence on its peer banks. From a policy perspective, the findings help understand whether banks exploit national safety nets and increase instability in the financial system.

Market Reaction to Bank Liquidity Regulation

We measure market reactions to announcements concerning liquidity regulation, a key innovation in the Basel framework. Our initial results show that liquidity regulation attracts negative abnormal returns. However, the price responses are less pronounced when coinciding announcements concerning capital regulation are backed out, suggesting that markets do not consider liquidity regulation to be binding. Bank- and country-specific characteristics also matter. Liquid balance sheets and high charter values increase abnormal returns whereas smaller long-term funding mismatches reduce abnormal returns. Banks located in countries with large government debt and tight interbank conditions or with prior domestic liquidity regulation display lower abnormal returns.

Monitoring Matters: Debt Seniority, Market Discipline and Bank Conduct

We examine if debtholders monitor banks and if such monitoring constrains risk-taking. Leveraging an unexplored experiment in the U.S. that changes the priority structure of claims on banks’ assets, we provide novel insights into the debate on market discipline. We document asymmetric effects for monitoring effort depending on whether a creditor class moves up or down the priority ladder. Conferring priority to depositors reduces deposit rates but increases interest rates for non-deposit liabilities, suggesting greater incentives for junior debtholders to exert monitoring effort. Consistent with the idea that senior claims require lower risk premiums, banks increasingly rely on deposit funding following changes in the priority structure. More intensive monitoring also influences conduct: subordinating non-depositor claims reduces risk taking. Our results highlight that changes in the priority structure are a complementary tool to regulation which has received little attention in prior work.