Journal of Financial Stability最新文献

We show how external credit market development can affect corporate social responsibility. Using a sample of US public firms over the period 1991–2010, we find that bank deregulation negatively affects CSR performance. We argue that deregulation-induced banking competition enhances credit accessibility, thereby reducing firms’ incentives to pursue CSR as a means of securing stakeholder rewards. Empirical evidence shows that firms increase their use of debt financing in response to the intensified banking competition, and these firms experience a more pronounced decline in CSR performance. We alleviate the potential concern that the observed decline in CSR could be attributed to changes in bank monitoring following deregulation. Further analyses find that firms reduce CSR regardless of their material nature, suggesting that the primary driver of CSR could be the trade-off between costs and returns. Overall, our findings shed light on the strategic motives of CSR, which exhibits adaptability in response to business dynamism.

In this paper, we investigate price exuberance episodes in the main UK commercial real estate sectors – retail, offices and industrials - over the period December 1986–April 2022. Using the Backward Supremum Augmented Dickey Fuller approach of Phillips et al. (2015a,b), we find that episodes of price explosiveness are asynchronous across sectors with only common phase being the period 2003–2007. We also conduct a multivariate probit analysis to identify factors that indicate the occurrence of price exuberance episodes and generate early signals for possible price bubble building. The predictors for price explosiveness differ by sector with more consistent signals obtained from the yield curve for retail and industrials, rent growth for offices and industrials, and inflation for retail and offices. A key implication of this study is that the study of price exuberance and bubbles in private real estate should be sector specific even within the same country.

In this study, we examine the relationship between firm-level political risk and stock price crash risk. Using a broad dataset of 4230 U.S. firms, 38,097 firm-year observations from 2002 to 2019, we reveal a positive association between political risk and stock price crash risk. These findings are robust to several model specifications and endogeneity checks. By using the Brexit referendum as a quasi-natural experiment, we provide evidence of a causal relationship between political risk and crash risk. Through channel analysis, we identify that this relationship is mediated via higher idiosyncratic volatility, lower price informativeness, and higher distress risk. We also find that our results are more pronounced in intangible-intensive firms. Interestingly, we show that managers of these firms respond to political risk by engaging in bad news hoarding. Finally, strong (external or internal) corporate governance mechanisms can moderate the positive relationship between political risk and stock price crash risk.

Charge-offs provide critical insights into the risk level of loan portfolios within the banking system, signaling potential systemic risks that could lead to deep recessions. Utilizing consolidated financial statements, we have compiled the net charge-off rate (COR) data from the 10 largest U.S. bank holding companies (BHCs) for disaggregated loans, including business loans, real estate loans, and consumer loans, as well as the average COR for each loan category among these top 10 banks. We propose factor-augmented forecasting models for CORs that incorporate latent common factor estimates, including targeted factors, via an array of data dimensionality reduction methods for a large panel of macroeconomic predictors. Our models have demonstrated superior performance compared with benchmark forecasting models, particularly well for business loan and real estate loan CORs, while predicting consumer loan CORs remains challenging especially at short horizons. Notably, real activity factors improve the out-of-sample predictability over the benchmarks for business loan CORs even when financial sector factors are excluded.

The vacuum caused by the absence of a political leader has a major economic impact. We manually collect data on the absence of a political leader in 247 Chinese cities between 2009 and 2019 and find that firms reduce their investment by an average of 2.326 % for each month that a political office remains vacant. This result holds even after subjecting the data to a series of endogeneity tests, robustness tests, and alternative explanations. We also demonstrate that the absence of a political leader reduces corporate investment through increased uncertainty of economic policy, reduced governmental efficiency, and disrupted political connections. Finally, our results show that this kind of absence has a more pronounced impact on younger firms, firms located in provinces with slower marketization, firms located in provinces with weak media development, non-state-owned enterprises, and firms located in regions under significant promotional pressure.

This study explores the empirical link between income inequality and banks’ Loan Loss Provisions (LLPs) through a sample of banking institutions from 132 countries, applying a panel regression methodology. The evidence reveals that higher LLPs have a positive impact on income inequality, and the findings remain valid across various model specifications and income inequality measures. The results also hold against various robustness tests, such as different bank sizes, developed vs. emerging countries, the impact of the 2008 global financial crisis, and the controlling for risk. The implications are relevant for stakeholders, including regulators that endeavor to protect banking systems against expected and unexpected losses via LLPs. Specifically, since credit decisions have substantial effects on income inequality, regulators should mitigate the accumulation of LLPs, allowing more funds to be available for other banking system activities and functions.

We study the effects of both tighter and looser bank capital requirements on bank risk-taking. We exploit credit register data matched with firm and bank level data in conjunction with changes in capital requirements stemming from Basel III, including the introduction of a SME supporting bank capital factor in the European Union. We find that tighter capital requirements reduce the supply of bank credit to firms, while looser capital requirements mitigate the credit supply effects of increasing capital. Importantly, at the loan level (credit supply), banks more affected by capital requirements change less the supply of credit to riskier than to safer firms, and these asymmetric effects occur for both the tightening and the loosening of bank capital requirements. Finally, these effects are also important at the firm-level for total credit availability and for firm survival. Interestingly, our results suggest that those banks most impacted by the tighter Basel III capital requirements prioritize credit among ex-ante riskier firms to avoid their closure, consistent with loan evergreening.

A simple macroeconomic model with banking, financial frictions, and flexible exchange rates is used to study the performance of fiscal, monetary and macroprudential policy combinations in response to domestic and external shocks. After characterizing the transmission process of each instrument, a diagrammatic analysis of how these policies should be used, either individually or jointly, to promote economic and financial stability, is provided. The analysis shows that whether a policy should be assigned to internal or external balance, and whether it should be contractionary or expansionary, depends not only on the nature of the shocks impinging on the economy but also on the range of tools available to policymakers and the strength of financial frictions. In particular, in response to an external financial shock, monetary policy should be assigned to external balance, and fiscal policy or macroprudential regulation to internal balance. These two policies are substitutes when used in combination with monetary policy.

We examine corporate disclosure patterns according to changes in firm states during financial crises in Korea. Using panel data on Korean listed firms from 1995 to 2019, we first confirm that they transparently (opaquely) disclose information when the change in return on assets is positive (negative) during crises. Moreover, we check that these disclosure patterns increase debt financing but are ineffective for equity financing. Finally, for chaebols with internal capital markets, we find that internal capital receivers provide transparent (opaque) disclosure of negative (positive) changes in their states. By contrast, providers show the opposite patterns. (JEL G01, G30, M40)

We find that societal trust—the extent to which residents of a country trust others—is associated with a more efficient bankruptcy process. Bankruptcy resolutions are faster, efficient outcomes are more likely, and the value lost during the bankruptcy process is lower in countries with higher societal trust. This effect of societal trust on the efficiency of the bankruptcy process is more pronounced in countries with low-income per capita, and in corrupt countries. Our results are derived from the analysis of survey data concerning the outcomes of a hypothetical firm's bankruptcy in 99 countries from 2004 to 2020, a dataset also utilized by Djankov et al. (2008).