Thomas K. Kick

Slippery slopes of stress: ordered failure events in German banking

Outright bank failures without prior indication of financial instability are very rare. Supervisory authorities monitor banks constantly. Thus, they usually obtain early warning signals that precede ultimate failure and, in fact, banks can be regarded as troubled to varying degrees before outright closure. But to our knowledge virtually all studies that predict bank failures neglect the ordinal nature of bank distress. Exploiting the distress database of the Deutsche Bundesbank we distinguish four different distress events that banks experience. Only the worst entails a bank to exit the market. Weaker orders of distress are, first, compulsory notifications of the authorities about potential problems, second, corrective actions such as warnings and hearings and, third, actions by banking pillars insurance schemes. Since the four categories of hazard functions are not proportional, we specify a generalized ordered logit model to estimate the respective probabilities of distress simultaneously. Our model estimates each set of probabilities with high accuracy and confirms, first, the necessity to account for different kinds of distress events and, second, the violation of the proportional odds assumption implicit in most limited dependent analyses of bank failure.

Recovery Determinants of Distressed Banks: Regulators, Market Discipline, or the Environment?

Based on detailed regulatory intervention data among German banks during 1994-2008, we test if supervisory measures affect the likelihood and the timing of bank recovery. Severe regulatory measures increase both the likelihood of recovery and its duration while weak measures are insignificant. Results seem not to be driven by regulators directing measures to particularly bad banks. That is, our results remain intact when we exclude banks that eventually exit the market due to restructuring mergers or moratoria. More transparent publication requirements of public incorporation that indicate more exposure to market discipline are barely or not at all significant. Increasing earnings and cleaning credit portfolios are consistently of importance to increase recovery likelihood, whereas earnings growth accelerates the timing of recovery. Macroeconomic conditions also matter for bank recovery. Hence, concerted micro- and macro-prudential policies are key to facilitate distressed bank recovery.

Income Structure and Bank Business Models: Evidence on Performance and Stability from the German Banking Industry

We analyze the determinants of fee income activities and their impact on financial performance and the risk profile of German banks between 1995 and 2011. We find empirical evidence that for all German universal banks, risk-adjusted returns on equity and total assets are positively affected by an increase in fee business. We show that commercial banks induce much higher risk by expanding their fee-generating activities than do cooperative and savings banks. We also examine how banks’expansion into fee-based services affects their interest margin. We find that banks with a strong focus on fee business charge lower interest margins.

Bank Executives’ Outside Directorships and Career Outcomes

We employ a unique sample of 5000 outside directorships held by German executive bank directors over 1993-2015 to examine whether these directorships proxy reputational capital and/or bankers’ private information. We exploit various circumstances of executive directors’ appointments and bank performance with bank-fixed-effect and difference-in-differences estimations to show that outside directorships enhance value for the bank and improve executives’ career outcomes, mostly because these posts signal good managerial ability and access to valuable private information about clients. Overall, our results suggest that bankers’ outside directorships have a dual role in the German corporate governance system.