Mark D. Vaughan

Do depositors care about enforcement actions

Since 1990, federal bank supervisors have publicly announced formal enforcement actions. This change in regime provides a natural laboratory to test two propositions: (1) claims by economists that putting confidential supervisory information in the public domain will enhance market discipline and (2) claims by bank supervisors that releasing such data will spark runs. To evaluate these propositions, we measure depositor reaction to 87 Federal Reserve announcements of enforcement actions. We compare deposit growth rates and yield spreads before and after the announcements at the sample banks and a control group of peer banks. The data show no evidence of unusual deposit withdrawals or spread increases at the sample banks following the announcements of formal actions. These results suggest that public announcements of enforcement actions did not spark bank runs or enhance depositor discipline. Apparently, depositors did not care a great deal about our sample actions.

Can Feedback from the Jumbo-CD Market Improve Bank Surveillance?

We examine the value of jumbo certificate-of-deposit (CD) signals in bank surveillance. To do so, we first construct proxies for default premiums and deposit runoffs and then rank banks based on these risk proxies. Next, we rank banks based on the output of a logit model typical of the econometric models used in off-site surveillance. Finally, we compare jumbo-CD rankings and surveillance-model rankings as tools for predicting financial distress. Our comparisons include eight out-of-sample test windows during the 1990s. We find that rankings obtained from jumbo-CD data would not have improved on rankings obtained from conventional surveillance tools. More importantly, we find that jumbo-CD rankings would not have improved materially over random rankings of the sample banks. These findings validate current surveillance practices and, when viewed with other recent empirical tests, raise questions about the value of market signals in bank surveillance.

Did FDICIA Enhance Market Discipline? A Look at Evidence from the Jumbo-CD Market

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act of 1991 (FDICIA) forced uninsured creditors such as jumbo-CD holders to bear more of the losses from bank failures. Because no other federal laws affecting loss exposure took effect in the surrounding years, the Act offers a natural experiment for assessing the supervisory returns from greater reliance on debt markets to police bank risk. Accordingly, we examine the sensitivity of jumbo-CD yields and run-offs to risk before and after FDICIA as well as the implied impact of any risk penalties on bank profitability. The evidence indicates that yields and run-offs were risk sensitive in both periods, but that this sensitivity was always economically small and, more importantly, was not significantly higher after the Act. These findings suggest that raising the deposit-insurance ceiling would not - at least in the current institutional and economic environment - exacerbate moral hazard. More importantly, they also suggest that operationalizing debt-market discipline as pillar of bank supervision could prove more difficult than previously thought.

Should the FDIC Worry About the FHLB? The Impact of Federal Home Loan Bank Advances on the Bank Insurance Fund

Does growing commercial-bank reliance on Federal Home Loan Bank (FHLBank) advances increase expected losses to the Bank Insurance Fund (BIF)? Our approach to this question begins by modeling the link between advances and expected losses. We then quantify the effect of advances on default probability with a CAMELS-downgrade model. Finally, we assess the impact on loss-given-default by estimating resolution costs in two scenarios: the liquidation of all banks with failure probabilities above two percent and the liquidation of all banks with advance-to-asset ratios above 15 percent. The evidence points to non-trivial increases in expected losses. The policy implication is that the FDIC should price FHLBank-related exposures.