Stefan Gissler

From Finance to Extremism: The Real Effects of Germany's 1931 Banking Crisis

Do financial crises radicalize voters? We study Germanys banking crisis of 1931, when two major banks collapsed and voting for radical parties soared. We collect new data on bank branches and firm-bank connections of over 5,500 firms and show that incomes plummeted in cities affected by the bank failures; connected firms curtailed their payrolls. We further establish that Nazi votes surged in locations exposed to failing Danatbank, led by a prominent Jewish manager and targeted by anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda. Our results suggest a synergy between cultural and economic factors: Danatbanks collapse boosted Nazi support especially in cities with deep-seated anti-Semitism; and the Nazis gained few additional votes in cities exposed to collapsing Dresdner Bank, which was not the target of Nazi hate speech. Danat-exposed and non-exposed cities were similar in their pre-crisis characteristics and exhibited no differential pre-trends; firms borrowing from Danat had lower leverage before the crisis than other firms. Unobservables are unlikely to account for the results.

Over-the-Counter Market Liquidity and Securities Lending

This paper studies how over-the-counter (OTC) market liquidity was adversely affected by the collapse of securities lending during the 2007-2008 financial crisis. We combine micro-data on corporate bond OTC market trades with securities lending transactions, in which life insurance companies are major counterparties. We exploit cross-sectional differences in the corporate bonds that are held and lent by life insurance companies to estimate the causal effect of securities lending on corporate bond market liquidity. We show that the collapse of AIGs securities lending programs in 2008 caused a substantial and long-lasting reduction in the market liquidity of the corporate bonds that were predominantly held by AIG, even after controlling for the interaction between funding liquidity and market liquidity. We find that some of the increase in the illiquidity of bonds held predominantly by AIG can be attributed to a sharp increase in relatively small trades among a greater number of dealers.

The Increased Role of the Federal Home Loan Bank System in Funding Markets, Part 3 : Implications for Financial Stability

This note is the third part in a three part series. Part 1 provides some historical background and discusses key institutional characteristics of the Federal Home Loan Banks (FHLB) System. Part 2 highlights some of the recent trends in the FHLB system and potential drivers of those trends. This note discusses the implication of these developments for financial stability.

The Increased Role of the Federal Home Loan Bank System in Funding Markets, Part 2: Recent Trends and Potential Drivers

This note is the second part in a three part series. Part 1 provides some historical background and discusses key institutional characteristics of the Federal Home Loan Banks (FHLB) System. This note discusses recent trends in the FHLB system and potential drivers of those trends.