Contributions published at Banking (Steven Ongena)

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Are Islamic banks inherently more stable than conventional banks? We address this question by applying a survival analysis based on the Cox proportional hazard model to a comprehensive sample of 421 banks in 20 Middle and Far Eastern countries from 1995 to 2010. By comparing the failure risk for both bank types, we find that Islamic banks have a significantly lower risk of failure than that of their conventional peers. This lower risk is based both unconditionally and conditionally on bank-specific (microeconomic) variables as well as macroeconomic and market structure variables. Our findings indicate that the design and implementation of early warning systems for bank failure should recognize the distinct risk profiles of the two bank types.

Növeli-e az alacsony kamatláb a banki hitelkínálatot? Tanulmányunkban egy magyar, vállalati szintű hiteladatbázis panelstruktúrában történő elemzésével keressük a választ a kérdésre. Kashyap–Stein [2000] identifikációs módszerét vállalati és idő fix hatásokkal kiegészítve teszteljük a feltételezést, hogy a kamatok csökkenése különbözőképpen befolyásolja-e az alacsony és a magas sajáttőke-­hányaddal rendelkező bankok hitelkínálatát. Azt találjuk, hogy a kamatláb csökkenését követően az alacsony tőkehányadú bankok nagyobb valószínűséggel nyújtanak hitelt új felvevőknek, és növelik kihelyezett hitelösszegeiket már meglévő adósaik számára, mint a magas tőkehányadú bankok. Robusztussági becsléseink azt tanúsítják, hogy valóban a bankok sajáttőke-hányada, nem pedig likviditási hányada, teljes eszközértéke vagy tulajdonosi szerkezete korrelál a hitelkínálati reakció erősségével. Megmutatjuk, hogy ezek az eredményeink fennálltak a válság előtti időszakban is, és függetlenek a mintánkban szereplő cégek méretétől. Elemzéseinkből arra következtetünk, hogy Magyarországon a vizsgált időszakban (2005–2011) a kamatláb befolyásolta a hitelkínálat mértékét. Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) Kód: E51, E52, G21.

Does market power of banks affect firm performance? To answer this question we examine 25,236 syndicated loan facilities granted between 2000 and 2010 by 296 banks to 9,029 US non-financial firms. Accounting for both observed and unobserved bank and firm heterogeneity, we find that firms that were recently poorly performing obtain loans from banks with more market power. However, in the year after loan origination market power positively affects firm performance, but only if it is not too high. Our estimates thus suggest that bank market power can facilitate access to credit by poorly-performing firms, yet at the same time also boosts the performance of the firms that obtain credit.

The positive relationship between democratic development and economic outcomes is well established. Using three decades of international data, this column identifies a new channel for this effect – the cost of credit to corporations. It also analyses loan pricing in Turkey to reveal a substantial rise in the average cost of lending after the attempted coup d’etat in July 2016. Together, these results highlight how efficiency in loan pricing results in a comparative advantage for firms in democratic countries over those in less democratic or authoritarian countries.

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We explain the number of bank relationships a firm maintains by the number of industries it operates in, analyzing 13,570 listed firms in 18 Eastern European countries. We estimate a variety of stylized models including OLS, Tobit and negative binomial that directly accounts at once for the number of bank relationships. Controlling for many firm characteristics and accounting for all observed and unobserved time-invariant heterogeneity across firms, we find that the number of industries the firm operates in corresponds to a higher number of bank relationships, possibly because banks specialize in certain industries.

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This paper provides evidence on the strategic lending decisions made by banks facing a negative funding shock. Using bank-rm level credit data, we show that banks reallocate credit within their domestic loan portfolio in at least three dierent ways. First, banks reallocate to sectors where they have high sector presence. Second, they also reallocate to sectors in which they are heavily specialized. Third, they reallocate credit towards low-risk rms. These reallocation eects are economically large. A standard deviation improvement in sector presence, sector specialization or rm risk reduces the transmission of the funding shock to credit supply by 20, 13 and 10%, respectively. We also provide insight in the timing of these reallocation decisions. Reallocation to sectors in which a bank has a high sector presence is almost instantaneous, while sector specialization starts playing a role four to ve months after the shock.

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The term “shadow banking” refers to credit intermediation performed outside the regulated perimeter of traditional lenders. Banks, however, do play a significant role in it. The authors review the origins and characteristics of the shadow banking system, investigate how banks control various steps of the securitization process, and analyze the nexus with competition. They use a double-output formulation of the Lerner index to disentangle the market power of lending and non-traditional activities. They find important differences in the two indicators, consistently with the common narrative. The market power related to non-traditional activities is both larger in magnitude and more pro-cyclical than that estimated for traditional lending. The authors’ findings suggest that banks might engage in less traditional business lines to alleviate the competitive pressure borne on core activities.

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This paper provides evidence on the strategic lending decisions made by banks facing a negative funding shock. Using bank-firm level credit data, we show that banks reallocate credit within their domestic loan portfolio in at least three different ways. First, banks reallocate to sectors where they have high sector presence. Second, they also reallocate to sectors in which they are heavily specialized. Third, they reallocate credit towards low-risk firms. These reallocation effects are economically large. A standard deviation improvement in sector presence, sector specialization or firm risk reduces the transmission of the funding shock to credit supply by 20, 13 and 10%, respectively. We also provide insight in the timing of these reallocation decisions. Reallocation to sectors in which a bank has a high sector presence is almost instantaneous, while sector specialization starts playing a role four to five months after the shock.

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We extract an exogenous measure of gender bias from survey responses by descendants of U.S. immigrants on questions about the role of women in society. We then use data on around 6,000 small business firms from 17 countries and find that in high-gender-bias countries, female entrepreneurs are more likely to opt out of the loan application process and to resort to informal finance, even though banks do not appear to actively discriminate against them. These results are not driven by credit risk differences between female- and male-owned firms or by any idiosyncrasies in the set of countries in our sample.

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