did tarp distort competition among sound unsupported banks i introduction did the financial support of distressed u s banks by the capital purchase program cpp affect loan and funding rates as measures of price competition the cpp the largest single element of the troubled asset relief program tarp dispersed around 204 9 billion to 707 u s banks between q4 08 and q4 09 as of july 31 2014 the treasury recovered 225 9 billion of this cpp support in the form of repayments dividends and interest turning the program into a positive return for taxpayers timothy masad deputy secretary of the treasury in charge accordingly called tarp a success in the final hearing of the congressional oversight panel cop on march 4 2011 see http cop senate gov and liu et al 2013 agreed in their analysis of the substantial financial and return recovery of banks that received cpp funds however on an economic cost benefit basis it is not clear whether taxpayers had a net positive return calomiris and khan 2015 yet in its final assessment the cop 2011 paints a more nuanced picture although the cost of tarp was much lower than anticipated it might also have induced distortions of market mechanisms in the form of increased risk taking and reduced competition the former issue has received considerable attention in recent studies black and hazelwood 2013 dam and koetter 2012 duchin and sosyura 2014 gropp et al 2011 whereas evidence about competitive distortions due to tarp is rare bailout schemes can distort competition in two ways directly by subsidizing rescued banks and indirectly by inducing undesirable market conduct by unsupported banks specifically government bailouts directly distort banking competition because insurance schemes treat banks differently depending on the size of the subsidy beck et al 2010 which upsets any existing level playing field empirical evidence about the direct effect of bailouts on competition is mixed calderon and schaeck 2015 show with a sample of 46 banking crises in 138 countries that government support of troubled banks led to more banking competition and lower interest margins after a crisis the main benefits accrue to borrowers in already financially well provided segments in contrast berger and roman 2015b show that tarp supported u s banks exhibited higher lerner margins and market shares compared with unsupported banks in the period after q4 09 driven by banks that repaid early while suppliers of funds require lower risk premiums tarp capital infusions required a dividend yield of 5 in the first 5 years of support increasing to 9 thereafter in addition tarp infusions were tied to executive compensation caps bayazitova and shivdasani 2012 berger and roman 2015b conclude that the safety net benefits of tarp outweighed the cost disadvantages even if bailouts are allocated on perfectly equal terms to all banks the provided insurance creates socially undesirable additional risk taking keeley 1990 consistent with this view the congressional oversight panel 2011 voiced concerns that tarp equity provisions provided supported banks with a competitive advantage that could lead to consolidation and further concentration to the detriment of small or local community banks in particular in turn these subsidized survivors with their increased market power could invoke additional welfare losses by charging higher interest rates to borrowers that represent poor credit risks theoretically hakenes and schnabel 2010 emphasize the importance of indirect effects of government bailouts on unsupported peers too the increased protection of banks that anticipate bailouts reduces the margins and charter values of competing unsupported banks prospective bailouts also induce depositors to require lower default premiums such that the reduced funding costs imply more lending by protected banks which translates into increased competitive pressure on unsupported incumbents

flight to quality in banking and economic activity abstract recent explanations of the transmission mechanism of monetary policy have emphasized that riskier lower net worth borrowers are more dependent on bank lending than larger less risky borrowers evidence from the federal reserve s survey on terms of bank lending indicates that the proportion of relatively high quality new loans safe moves countercyclically and granger causes gdp and inventory investment in the aftermath of a tightening of monetary policy the safe variable increases and in turn policy tends to relax once safe has risen

banks as multioutput oligopolies an empirical evaluation of the retail and corporate banking markets the distinction between retail and corporate banking markets is of much importance in real life banking organizations the two markets differ with respect to concentration the importance of informational asymmetries and the extent of customer mobility within a standard conjectural variation model estimated on cost efficient banks as well as on the full sample of banks the authors empirically characterize the strategic behavior in each of these markets and also focus on cross market interactions to see whether initial moves in one market affect the equilibrium in the other market they compare their findings to the predictions that would follow from merely considering concentration ratios such as the herfindahl index

foreign entry and bank competition abstract foreign entry and bank competition are modeled as the interaction between asymmetrically informed principals the entrant uses collateral as a screening device to contest the incumbent s informational advantage both better information ex ante and stronger legal protection ex post are shown to facilitate the entry of low cost outside competitors into credit markets the entrant s success in gaining borrowers of higher quality by offering cheaper loans increases with its efficiency cost advantage this paper accounts for evidence suggesting that foreign banks tend to lend more to large firms thereby neglecting small and medium enterprises the results also explain why this observed bias is stronger in emerging markets

bank competition and firm creation we investigate the effects of competition in the financial sector on the creation of firms in the nonfinancial sector explicitly allowing for heterogeneous effects across borrowers characterized by different degrees of asymmetric information we find evidence of a bell shaped relationship between bank competition and firm creation in addition consistently with theories arguing that competition may reduce the availability of credit to informationally opaque firms we find that bank competition results less favorable to the emergence of new firms in industrial sectors where informational asymmetries are more important

banks and loan sales marketing nonmarketable assets theories of financial intermediation predict that bank loans should not be marketable because of moral hazard problems banks will not conduct credit risk analysis or monitor borrowers if they are not at risk for failing to perform these services throughout most of history bank loans have not in fact been marketable yet by the end of the 1980 s the amount of commercial and industrial loan sales outstanding had grown to over 250 billion from trivial amounts at the beginning of the decade to explain the opening of this loan sales market we present a model of incentive compatible loan sales that allows for implicit contractual features between loan sellers and loan buyers we then test for the presence of these features using a sample of over 800 recent loan sales

information and bank credit allocation abstract private information obtained by lenders leads to borrower capture to the extent that such information cannot be communicated credibly to outsiders we analyze how this capture affects the loan portfolio allocation of informed lenders first we show that banks charge higher interest rates and finance relatively less creditworthy borrowers in market segments with greater information asymmetries second when faced with greater competition from outside lenders banks reallocate credit toward more captured borrowers flight to captivity third if borrower quality and captivity are sufficiently correlated an increase in the competitiveness of uninformed lenders can worsen the informed lender s overall loan portfolio the model explains observed consequences of financial liberalizations

search frictions and market power in negotiated price markets we provide a framework for empirical analysis of negotiated price markets using mortgage market data and a search and negotiation model we characterize the welfare impact of search frictions and

financial system architecture this article builds a theory of financial system architecture we ask what is a financial market what is a bank and what determines the economic role of each starting with basic assumptions about primitives the types of agents and the nature of the informational asymmetries we provide a theory that explains which agents coalesce to form banks and which trade in the capital market it is shown that borrowers of higher observable qualities access the financial market moreover a financial system in its infancy will be bank dominated and increased financial market sophistication diminishes bank lending article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

information sharing and lending market competition with switching costs and poaching abstract we analyze information sharing with repeated banking competition in the presence of switching costs we find that information sharing renders poaching more profitable in future rounds of competition since the poaching activities can be targeted towards more creditworthy borrowers we find that information sharing reduces relationship benefits and therefore relaxes competition for initial market shares information sharing introduces a welfare tradeoff by promoting equilibrium profits at the expense of talented entrepreneurs whenever market power persists in credit market whereas it is a matter of indifference without market power thus information sharing may induce exclusion of creditworthy borrowers from credit markets

asset restructuring strategies in bank acquisitions does distance between dealing partners matter abstract one of the most lively debated effects of banking acquisitions is the change in lending and asset allocation of the target bank in favour of transaction based products at the expense of small and informationally opaque borrowers these changes may be the result of two distinct restructuring strategies pursued by the acquirer with respect to the asset portfolio of the acquired bank a cleaning strategy cs in which the acquirer makes a clean sweep of all the negative net present value activities in the portfolio of the acquired bank and a portfolio strategy ps in which the acquiring bank permanently changes the portfolio allocation of the acquired bank in this paper we focus on italian bank acquisitions and test which asset restructuring strategy was predominantly pursued over the period 1997 2003 moreover we distinguish acquisitions according to their geographic diversifying character and to the physical and cultural distances that separate acquiring from acquired banks when we look at the mean value we do not find clear evidence of a primacy either of css or pss when we separate in market from out of market bank acquisitions however results show that the css prevail only in the former type of deals while in the latter the portfolio of acquired banks is subject to pss finally we find that differences in asset restructuring strategies can be explained by differences in corporate culture and the workplace environment of the dealing partners

company interests and foreign aid policy playing donors off against one another abstract the evidence on conditionality indicates that this instrument sometimes works and sometimes does not work we suggest that third parties to the donor recipient relationship influence the aid disbursement the halt in aid that should follow non compliance could trigger the recipient to cancel contracts with companies from donor countries which creates incentives for the companies to put pressure towards aid disbursement we use a multi agent triadic model of the relationships between a recipient and two donors and two companies to illustrate that recipients may act strategically to make third parties like companies and others influence the disbursement decision failing to take account of third parties role yields the opposite result conditionality becomes successful

is financial inclusion good for bank stability international evidence abstract financial inclusion has become an important public policy priority following the recent global financial crisis yet we know very little of how it impacts soundness of the providers of financial services using an international sample of 2635 banks in 86 countries over the period 2004 12 we find that higher level of financial inclusion contributes to greater bank stability the positive association is particularly pronounced with those banks that have higher customer deposit funding share and lower marginal costs of providing banking services and also with those that operate in countries with stronger institutional quality the results are robust to instrumental variables analysis controlling for bank fixed effects alternative measures of financial inclusion among several other robustness tests our results highlight that the importance of ensuring inclusive financial system is not only a development goal but also an issue that should be prioritised by banks as such a policy drive is good for their stability

credit quantity and credit quality bank competition and capital accumulation in this paper we show that bank competition has an intrinsically ambiguous impact on capital accumulation we further show that it is also responsible for the emergence of development traps in economies that otherwise would be characterized by unique equilibria these results explain the conflicting evidence emerging from the recent empirical studies of the effects of bank competition on economic growth we obtain them developing a dynamic general equilibrium model of capital accumulation where banks operate in a cournot oligopoly more banks lead to a higher quantity of credit available to entrepreneurs but also to diminished incentives to offer relationship services that improve the likelihood of success of investment projects we also show that conditioning on one key parameter resolves the theoretical ambiguity in economies where intrinsic market uncertainty is high low less more competition leads to higher capital accumulation

securitization and lending competition we study the eects of securitization on interbank lending competition when banks see private signals of local applicants repayment chances if banks cannot securitize the outcome is e cient they lend to their most creditworthy local applicants with securitization banks lend also to remote applicants with strong observables in order to lessen the lemons problem they face in selling their securities this reliance on observables is ine cient raises the mean default risk and may lead to a deceptive rise in credit scores

long lasting bank relationships and growth of firms a puzzling but consistent result in the empirical literature on banking is that firms with close bank ties do not grow faster than bank independent firms in this paper we reconsider the link between relationship lending and firm growth distinguishing firms by size and expansion contraction conditions the idea is that the beneficial effects of relationship lending on information asymmetries can be compensated by other negative capture risk and externality effects which make relational banks reluctant to support long term growth projects of client firms and that the strength of these compensating effects varies with firm size and health status we explore the influence of long lasting bank relationships on employment and asset growth of a large sample of italian firms the main finding is that relationship lending hampers the efforts of small firms to increase their size while it mitigates the negative growth of troubled medium large enterprises

competing lending platforms endogenous reputation and fragility in microcredit markets this paper shows that market fragility and mass default can arise in microcredit markets as a result of the strategic interaction between a microlender using a reputation based mechanism and a traditional lender using physical collateral in our model borrowers solve a dynamic programming problem which induces an endogenous equilibrium distribution of reputational capital because the quality of each lender s pool of borrowers is affected by both lenders interest rates lender reaction curves are non monotonic and discontinuous this can result in knife edge equilibria and mass default on the microlender precipitated by minor parametric perturbations fragility is exacerbated by borrower screening and sovereign risk but ameliorated when microlenders have social welfare goals our results highlight the importance of studying the entire credit market rather than microfinance in isolation

lending by example direct and indirect effects of foreign banks in emerging markets using a novel dataset that allows us to trace the bank relationships of a sample of mostly unlisted firms we explore which borrowers are able to benefit from foreign bank presence in emerging markets our results suggest that the limits to financial integration are less tight than the static picture of firm bank relationships implies even though foreign banks are more likely to engage large and foreign owned firms after an acquisition a bank is 20 less likely to terminate a relationship with a firm if the acquirer is foreign rather than domestic most importantly within a credit market firms appear to have the same access to financial loans and ability to invest whether they borrow from a foreign bank or not while foreign banks benefit all firms by indirectly enhancing credit access

the benefits of lending relationships evidence from small business data this paper empirically examines how ties between a firm and its creditors affect the availability and cost of funds to the firm we analyze data collected in a survey of small firms by the small business administration the primary benefit of building close ties with an institutional creditor is that the availability of financing increases we find smaller effects on the price of credit attempts to widen the circle of relationships by borrowing from multiple lenders increases the price and reduces the availability of credit in sum relationships are valuable and appear to operate more through quantities rather than prices

the effect of risk characteristics on the willingness to pay for mortality risk reductions from electric power generation the objective of this study is to estimate willingness to pay wtp for the reduction of mortality risks caused by fossil fuel natural gas coal and oil versus nuclear electric power generation systems and to examine the influence of risk characteristics involved with electric power generation on wtp a choice experiment was conducted to achieve these objectives the attributes for nuclear risks in the experiment included the probability of disasters and the expected losses if a disaster occurs we find evidence of i a baseline effect where wtp is sensitive to hypothetical versus actual baseline expected mortality ii a labeling effect where surprisingly the term nuclear has no effect on wtp but the term fossil fueled power generation results in lower wtp and iii disaster aversion meaning that people focus on the conditional loss from a nuclear disaster not the probability we also find that the wtp for reducing deaths from a nuclear disaster is about 60 times the wtp for routine reducing fossil fuel generation related deaths