María Fabiana Penas

Deposit Insurance and Bank Risk-Taking: Evidence from Internal Loan Ratings

We analyze the effect of deposit insurance on the risk-taking behavior of banks in the context of a quasi-natural experiment using detailed credit registry data. Using the case of an emerging economy, Bolivia, which introduced a deposit insurance system during the sample period, we compare the risk-taking behavior of banks before and after the introduction of this system. We find that in the post-deposit insurance period, banks are more likely to initiate riskier loans (i.e., loans with worse internal ratings at origination). These loans carry higher interest rates and are associated with worse ex-post performance (i.e., they have higher default and delinquency rates). Banks do not seem to compensate for the extra risk by increasing collateral requirements or decreasing loan maturities. We also find evidence that the increase in risk-taking is due to the decrease in market discipline from large depositors. Finally, differences between large (too-big-to-fail) and small banks diminished in the post-deposit insurance period.

Market Size Structure and Small Business Lending: Are Crisis Times Different from Normal Times?

Conventional wisdom holds that small banks have comparative advantages vis-à-vis large banks in serving small firms, while recent literature suggests this may not be the case. Using a panel of recent US start-ups, we investigate how small bank presence affects these firms in normal times (2004-2006) and in the recent financial crisis (2007-2009). We find that greater small bank presence yields significantly more lending to and slightly lower failure rates of these firms during normal times. However, these benefits disappear during the financial crisis, possibly because small banks are less diversified and benefit less from government guarantees than large banks.

Debtor Rights, Credit Supply, and Innovation

Firms’ innovative activities can be sensitive to public policies that affect the availability of capital for risky projects. In this paper, we investigate the effects of regional and temporal variation in U.S. personal bankruptcy laws on firms’ innovative activities. We find bankruptcy laws that provide stronger debtor protection decrease the number of patents produced by small firms. Stronger debtor protection also decreases the average quality, and variance in quality, of firms’ patents. We find evidence that the negative effect of stronger debtor protection on experimentation and innovation may be due to the decreased availability of external finance in response to stronger debtor rights — an effect amplified in industries with a high dependence on external finance. Hence, while it is typically assumed that stronger debtor protection encourages innovation by reducing the cost of failure for innovators, we show that it can instead dampen innovative activities by tightening the availability of external finance to innovators.

How Do Banks Screen Innovative Firms? Evidence from Start-Up Panel Data

Start-up firms often face difficulties in raising external funds. Employing a unique panel dataset covering 9,715 start-up firms over the period 2007-2009, we find that high-tech startups are less likely to use bank finance and face more difficulties in raising bank finance than low-tech start-ups. We find that external credit scores do affect the availability of credit for start-up firms, but that banks rely less on external rating information in their decision making for high-tech start-ups than low-tech start-ups. Start-ups that have their main relation with a small bank use more bank finance and report less difficulties in getting credit. By contrast, a greater expertise of the bank in the firms industry is not associated with fewer difficulties to get bank loans. There are no differences between high-tech and low-tech start-ups regarding the impact of bank size.

Determinants of Banking System Fragility: A Regional Perspective

Banking systems are fragile not only within one country but also within and across regions. We study the role of regional banking system characteristics for regional banking system fragility. We find that regional banking system fragility reduces when banks in the region jointly hold more liquid assets, are better capitalized, and when regional banking systems are more competitive. For Asia and Latin-America, a greater presence of foreign banks also reduces regional banking fragility. We further investigate the possibility of contagion within and across regions. Within region banking contagion is important in all regions but it is substantially lower in the developed regions compared to emerging market regions. For cross-regional contagion, we find that the contagion effects of Europe and the US on Asia and Latin America are significantly higher compared to the effect of Asia and Latin America among themselves. Finally, the impact of cross-regional contagion is attenuated when the host region has a more liquid and more capitalized banking sector.

Venture Capital and Innovation Strategies

Venture capital investors are specialized financial intermediaries that provides funding for technological innovation with the goal of realizing a capital gain within a few years. We are the first to examine the association of venture capital funding with a company’s choice of innovation strategies. We employ a unique dataset of over 10,000 innovative Dutch companies, some of which received venture financing. The data include detailed information on patent applications, innovation activities, and other company characteristics. We find that companies backed by venture capital focus on the build-up of absorptive capacity by engaging in both in-house R&D and in the acquisition of external knowledge. Companies that receive public funding, instead, are able to relax their financing constraints and perform more innovation activities without focusing solely on absorptive capacity. Our results also suggest that the correlation between venture capital funding and the build-up of absorptive capacity is not only due to a selection effect. We derive implications of these findings for corporate strategy and public policy.

Debtor Protection, Credit Redistribution, and Income Inequality

A debtor-friendly bankruptcy regime limits the amount of assets creditors can seize from distressed individuals. In response, creditors may redistribute credit towards richer and more able individuals. We show that increasing the amount of asset protection in bankruptcy (exemptions) leads to higher income inequality in the state. Using geographic variation in banking market structure and variation in capital needs across industries, we show that the increase in income inequality is mediated by a credit market channel. We analyze different population groups and find that the increase in inequality is driven by a growing income gap between unskilled and skilled individuals that affects both self-employed and wage workers. We also find a drop in the employment rate and in the relative wage of unskilled workers. Our results indicate that the redistribution of credit leads to an imbalance in economic opportunities among entrepreneurs that reduces the aggregate demand for unskilled labor.