Journal of Financial Intermediation最新文献

Using a novel dataset that combines information on customer-supplier trade relationships with information on firm-bank lending relationships, we show that common banks that lend to firms at both ends of a trade link grow and strengthen such trade relationships. To establish causality, we use bank mergers, which generate exogenous variations in the presence of common banks, and show that common bank relationships between customers and suppliers increase trade relationships by 49.6%. We find that the role of a common bank is greater when it is more informed and when supply chains suffer from larger information and holdup problems. We also document that suppliers with common banks face lower spillover risks from a distressed customer. Overall, our findings show the unique role of banks in driving inter-firm growth and investment by mitigating information and holdup problems, which arguably leads to greater economic growth.

Buy-and-hedge intermediaries are important investors in the convertible bond market as they intermediate between firms that require capital quickly and investors requiring time to assess the security. Their strategy requires them to manage the trade-offs involved with the costs and benefits of hedging. We find that prices of convertible securities reflect the costs that intermediaries incur when managing their positions. Especially cross-sectional and within-bond variation of intermediaries’ loan costs helps explain variation in convertible bond underpricing.

We investigate the impact of two central bank policies, asset purchases and asset lending, on the search frictions in the government bond market in Japan. We build a search-theoretic model to explore the impact of a central bank’s securities lending facility (SLF) by introducing a central bank as a lender. We test model predictions using intraday data from an electronic platform for Japanese government bonds. First, we find large-scale asset purchases (LSAPs) increase order imbalance in the repurchase agreement (repo) market. Threshold analysis reveals that asset purchase amounts exceeding 0.18% of the outstanding, which corresponds to 38.98% of our sample, cause a significantly higher imbalance. Second, the SLF has a floor effect on the repo rate by affecting dealers’ choices between the repo market and the SLF. Third, the novel friction measures we test show that LSAPs and the SLF have opposite influences on bargaining power in the repo market.

We investigate whether pre-publication revisions of bank financial statements contain forward-looking information about bank risk. Using 7.4 million observations of monthly financial reports from all banks in Brazil during 2007–2019, we show that 78 % of all revisions occur before the publication of these statements. The frequency, missing of reporting deadlines, and severity of revisions are positively related to future bank risk. Using machine learning techniques, we provide evidence on mechanisms through which revisions affect bank risk. Our findings suggest that private information about pre-publication revisions is useful for supervisors to monitor banks.

Financial intermediation has distinct value from transforming financial claims to create liquidity and mitigate risks. However, research and policy competition analyses often neglect this value or minimally account for it. We review findings to better incorporate this value. We suggest shifting the mix of individual services analyzed to better represent the distinct value, focusing more on topics closely aligned with the distinct value concept beyond individual services, and accounting for the multimarket nature of financial intermediation. We recommend attention on future competition with digital FinTech, BigTech, and DeFi firms and policies to best preserve the distinct value of financial intermediation.

Lenders’ simultaneous equity holdings introduce conflicts of interest among members of syndicated loans. We argue that lenders address such within-syndicate conflicts with financial covenant design to improve contracting efficiency. We show that loans with higher conflicts rely less on performance-based covenants, which serve as tripwires to facilitate ex-post control transfer and require coordination among syndicate members. Instead, high-conflict loans rely more on capital-based covenants to align shareholder-creditor interest ex-ante and incentivize shareholder monitoring. Overall, these results suggest that such conflicts can reduce capital flexibility and renegotiation efficiency for the borrowers.

We use bank-firm matched data to study how the capital buffers that large U.S. banks must satisfy to “pass” the Federal Reserve's stress tests impact banks’ lending and firms’ loan volumes, overall debt, investment, and employment. We find that larger stress-test capital buffers lead to reductions in banks’ lending, modest increases in loan rates and spreads, and reductions in new loan originations. However, we do not find an impact of higher capital buffers on firms’ overall debt, investment, and employment, suggesting that firms find other credit sources to substitute for the reduction in loans from banks that participate in the stress tests.

We study restructuring solutions to the debt overhang problem faced by banks with a deteriorated loan portfolio in the presence of asymmetric information on loan quality. Classical liability restructuring solutions fail to work because banks can overstate the severity of their bad loan problem to obtain additional concessions from existing creditors. A sufficiently large loan sale requirement to the restructuring banks discourages such an opportunistic behavior, so a suitably chosen menu of loan sales cum liability restructuring is able to solve the debt overhang. We discuss the implementation of such a solution for banks funded with insured deposits through loan sales to outside investors supported by an asset protection scheme sponsored by the deposit insurance fund.

We address whether politics played important roles in allocating Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) bailout funds, and whether PPP allocations effectively bailed out small businesses vs. banks. Our econometric evidence suggests that politicians/other government agents at national and local levels effectively steered PPP funds toward small businesses and banks based on their locations to try to influence election outcomes. We also uncover evidence that some PPP funds were effectively allocated by lobbying efforts of certain banks. Findings are confirmed by a novel mediation analysis and numerous robustness checks. We also find banks profited from PPP through multiple channels, adding to extant findings, and suggesting that PPP may have effectively bailed out banks as well as small businesses, but through different political influences.

The Jobs Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 cut the top dividend tax rate in the U.S. by more than half, yet numerous studies of nonfinancial firms have failed to detect the expected supply-side stimulus to capital investment. We test the impact of this tax cut on U.S. commercial banks and find that bank lending responded differently, conditional on banks’ access to external capital as well as their reliance on internal liquidity. Our heterogeneous results include support for all three branches of dividend tax theory. Loan growth increased the most at publicly traded banks with relatively illiquid balance sheets and increased by the least (or not at all) at untraded banks with relatively liquid balance sheets. Consistent with previous studies, we find increased dividend payouts at all subsets of banks. We conjecture that the effectively short maturities of bank loan contracts made banks better able to respond positively to this tax cut and provide some suggestive evidence in support of this conjecture.