Contingent Capital: Valuation and Risk Implications Under Alternative Conversion Mechanisms
Creators: Nouri, Behzad
Publisher: name: Columbia University
Year: 2012
Subjects: Finance
Operations research

description: Several proposals for enhancing the stability of the financial system include requirements that banks hold some form of contingent capital, meaning equity that becomes available to a bank in the event of a crisis or financial distress. Specific proposals vary in their choice of conversion trigger and conversion mechanism, and have inspired extensive scrutiny regarding their effectivity in avoiding costly public rescues and bail-outs and potential adverse effects on market dynamics. While allowing banks to leverage and gain a higher return on their equity capital during the upturns in financial markets, contingent capital provides an automatic mechanism to reduce debt and raise the loss bearing capital cushion during the downturns and market crashes; therefore, making it possible to achieve stability and robustness in the financial sector, without reducing efficiency and competitiveness of the banking system with higher regulatory capital requirements. However, many researchers have raised concerns regarding unintended consequences and implications of such instruments for market dynamics. Death spirals in the stock price near the conversion, possibility of profitable stock or book manipulations by either the investors or the issuer, the marketability and demand for such hybrid instruments, contagion and systemic risks arising from the hedging strategies of the investors and higher risk taking incentives for issuers are among such concerns. Though substantial, many of such issues are addressed through a prudent design of the trigger and conversion mechanism. In the following chapters, we develop multiple models for pricing and analysis of contingent capital under different conversion mechanisms. In Chapter 2 we analyze the case of contingent capital with a capital-ratio trigger and partial and on-going conversion. The capital ratio we use is based on accounting or book value to approximate the regulatory ratios that determine capital requirements for banks. The conversion process is partial and on-going in the sense that each time a bank's capital ratio reaches the minimum threshold, just enough debt is converted to equity to meet the capital requirement, so long as the contingent capital has not been depleted. In Chapter 3 we simplify the design to all-at-once conversion however we perform the analysis through a much richer model which incorporates tail risk in terms of jumps, endogenous optimal default policy and debt rollover. We also investigate the case of bail-in debt, where at default the original shareholders are wiped out and the converted investors take control of the firm. In the case of contingent convertibles the conversion trigger is assumed as a contractual term specified by market value of assets. For bail-in debt the trigger is where the original shareholders optimally default. We study incentives of shareholders to change the capital structure and how CoCo's affect risk incentives. Several researchers have advocated use of a market based trigger which is forward looking, continuously updated and readily available, while some others have raised concerns regarding unintended consequences of a market based trigger. In Chapter 4 we investigate one of these issues, namely the existence and uniqueness of equilibrium when the conversion trigger is based on the stock price.