Nikolaos I. Papanikolaou

The Road Towards the Establishment of the European Banking Union

The rising delinquencies in the U.S. subprime mortgage market in 2006 and the succeeding collapse in housing prices had a considerably negative impact on the functioning of the European financial systems and the smooth operation of European economies. Indeed, in the Euro-area, what started as a financial crisis escalated to a twin crisis after being doubled by the eruption of a massive sovereign debt crisis in 2010. The lack of an established set of bank supervision and resolution strategies at the Euro-area level, the vicious circle between banks and European nation-states, the threats for the sustainability of the common currency, and the deterioration of the market conditions were the key factors which lately led to the acceleration of the steps towards the creation of a banking union in Europe. The principal aim of the European Banking Union is to shape the necessary legal and institutional framework and provide the authorities with powers and tools to deal with ailing banks in order to prevent the devastating effects that a future shock may have on the financial system, the real economy, and the society. This paper presents the formal reactions of the sovereigns and the European Central Bank to the twin crisis, and critically discusses the key problems and the inherent weaknesses which led to the establishment of a banking union for the Euro-area member states. The structure of the banking union, the various aspects of its operation, and its future prospects are also presented and discussed.

Market structure, screening activity and bank lending behaviour

In this paper, we construct a spatial model of banking competition that considers the differential information among banks and potential borrowers to investigate how the market structure affects the lending behavior of banks and their incentives to invest in screening technology. Consistent with the prevailing view, our results show that a larger number of banks reduce lending cost, which, in turn, encourages the entry of new customers in the loan market. Also, that market structure has an important impact on banks’ incentives to screen loan applicants. In particular, we find that banks invest more in screening as a result of higher competition. This is largely explained by the fact that the number of bad credit applicants increases due to intensified competition. Consequently, banks resort to screening in order to efficiently protect themselves against excessive credit risk-taking. Overall, the paper provides support to a rather close relationship between the industry structure, the lending activity of banks, and bank investment in screening technology.

“Too-Small-To-Survive” versus “Too-Big-To-Fail” banks: The two sides of the same coin

In the recent crisis, the U.S. authorities bailed out numerous banks through TARP, whilst let many others to fail as going concern entities. Even though both interventions fully protect depositors, a bail out represents an implied subsidy to shareholders, which is not yet the case with closures where creditors are not subsidised. We investigate this non-uniform policy, demonstrating that size and not performance is the decision variable that endogenously determines one threshold below which banks are treated as TSTS by regulators and another one above which are considered to be TBTF. Our results suggest that regulators do not bailout the shareholders or the other uninsured creditors of a distressed bank if the bank is considered to be TSTS. Further, that the more complex a bank is the more likely is to be bailed out and, hence, to have all of its creditors protected. Banks which are perceived as being TBTF are also found to be too-complex-to-fail.

Applying Benford’s Law to Detect Accounting Data Manipulation in the Banking Industry

In this paper, we take a glimpse at the dark side of bank accounting statements by using a mathematical law which was established by Benford in 1938 to detect data manipulation. We shed the spotlight on the healthy, failed, and bailed out banks in the global financial crisis and test whether a set of balance sheet and income statement variables which are used by regulators to rate the performance and soundness of banks were manipulated in the years prior to and also during the crisis. We find that banks utilise loan loss provisions to manipulate earnings and income upwards throughout the examined periods. Together with loan loss provisions, problem banks resort to a downward manipulation of allowance for loan losses and non-performing loans with the purpose to tamper earnings upwards. We also provide evidence that manipulation is more prevalent in problem banks, which manage income and earnings to conceal their financial difficulties. Moreover, manipulation is found to be strengthened in the crisis period; it is also expanded to affect regulatory capital. Overall, banks utilise data manipulation without yet resorting to eye-catching manipulation strategies that may attract the scrutiny by regulators. Benford’s Law appears to be a suitable tool for assessing the quality of accounting information and for discovering irregularities in bank accounting data.

What Lies behind the 'Too-Small-To-Survive' Banks?

It is a common place that during financial crises, like the one started in 2007, authorities provide substantial financial support to some problem banks, whilst at the same time let several others to go bankrupt. Is this happening because some particular banks are considered important and big enough to save, whereas some others are perceived as being ‘Too-Small-To-Survive’? Is the size of banks the fundamental factor that makes authorities to treat them differently, or it is also that some banks perform poorly and are not capable of withstanding some considerable shocks whatsoever? Our study provides concrete answers to these questions thus filling part of the void in the existing literature. A short- and a long-run positive relationship between size and performance is documented regardless of the level of bank soundness (healthy vs. failed and assisted banks) under scrutiny. Importantly, we pose and lend support to the ‘Too-Small-To-Survive’ hypothesis according to which the impact of bank performance on failure probability strongly depends on size. Evidence shows that authorities tend not to save banks whose size is below some specific threshold.