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Contractual Savings Or Stock Market Development, which Leads?
This paper argues that contractual savings (assets of pension funds and life insurance companies) contribute to stock market development.
Market Discipline and Conflicts of Interest Between Banks and Pension Funds
We study the behavior of private pension funds as large depositors in a banking system. Using panel data analysis, we examine whether, and if so how, pension funds influence market discipline in Argentina in the period 1998-2001. We find evidence that pension funds exert market discipline and this discipline gets stronger as the share of pension fund deposits in a bank rises. However, conflicts of interest undermine the disciplining role of pension funds. Specifically, pension funds allocate deposits to banks with weak fundamentals that own pension fund management companies. We conclude that forbidding banks' ownership of companies involved in pension fund management can enhance market discipline.
A Gravity Model of Geopolitics and Financial Fragmentation
Do geopolitical tensions between countries influence the cross-border asset allocation of investment funds? Our answer is yes. We estimate gravity models and find that investment funds allocate smaller shares of their portfolios to recipient countries that are geopolitically more distant to their country of origin—with geopolitical distance measured by dissimilarity in countries’ voting behavior in the United Nations General Assembly. We also find an investment diversion effect: a recipient country attracts additional investments when its source countries get geopolitically more distant to third-party countries. These results are robust to instrumenting geopolitical distance and using alternative distance measures.
Bank Capital and Lending: An Extended Framework and Evidence of Nonlinearity
This paper studies the transmission of bank capital shocks to loan supply in Indonesia. A series of theoretically founded dynamic panel data models are estimated and find nonlinear effects of capital on loan growth: the response of weaker banks to changes in their capital positions is larger than that of stronger banks. This non-linearity implies that not only the level of capital but also its distribution across banks in the financial system affects the transmission of shocks to aggregate lending. Likewise, the effects of bank recapitalization on loan growth depend on banks’ starting capital positions and the size of capital injections.
When Banks Punch Back: Macrofinancial Feedback Loops in Stress Tests
In the presence of adverse macroeconomic shocks, simultaneous capital losses in multiple banks can prompt them to contract their balance sheets. These bank responses generate externalities that propagate in the form of macro-financial feedback loops. This paper develops a credit response and externalities analysis model (CREAM) that integrates a disaggregated banking sector into an otherwise standard macroeconomic structural vector autoregressive model. It shows that accounting for macro-financial feedback loops can significantly affect macroeconomic outcomes and bank-specific stress tests results. The heterogeneity in bank lending responses matters: it determines how each bank fares under adverse conditions and the external effects that banks impose on each other and on economic activity. The model can thus be used to assess the contributions of individual banks to systemic risk along the time dimension.
Do Corporate Bond Shocks Affect Commercial Bank Lending?
Understanding how corporate bond market disruptions are transmitted to the rest of the financial system is essential to gauge systemic financial risk and design policy responses. In this study, we extend the vector autoregression model of Gilchrist and Zakrajšek (2012) to explicitly account for the role of commercial banks in the transmission of corporate bond credit spread shocks. We find that corporate bond market shocks can reduce commercial bank lending activity by tightening loan supply. Policies designed to contain stress in the corporate bond market can thus mitigate systemic risk by limiting contagion to the commercial banking sector.
A Tradeoff between the Output and Current Account Effects of Pension Reform
We compare the long-term output and current account effects of pension reforms that increase the retirement age with those of reforms that cut pension benefits, conditional on reforms achieving similar fiscal targets. We show the presence of a policy trade-off. Pension reforms that increase the retirement age have a large positive effect on output, but a small (and often negative) effect on the current account. In contrast, reforms that cut pension benefits improve the current account balance but reduce output. Mixed pension reforms, which extend the working life and cut pension benefits, can simultaneously boost output and the current account.
People’s Republic of China
This Selected Issues paper focuses on the drivers, implications and outlook for China’s shrinking current account surplus. Although cyclical factors helped in 2018, the trend decline has been largely structural, driven by rebalancing, appreciation of the real effective exchange rate toward equilibrium, increase in outbound tourism, and moderation in goods surplus reflecting market saturation and China’s faster growth compared with trading partners. Policies should focus on continued rebalancing and opening to ensure excessive surpluses do not return; and to prepare the economy and the financial system to handle more volatile capital flows. From a global perspective, the decline in China’s surplus has lowered global imbalances, with different impact across countries, with the trade balances of Korea, Germany, Brazil improving vis-à-vis China, while that of Japan, India, and Indonesia deteriorating. Further declines in the current account surplus will reduce excess global imbalances—a positive development for global stability.
Are Islamic Banks More Resilient during Financial Panics?
Rapid growth of Islamic banking in developing countries is accompanied with claims about its relative resilience to financial crises as compared to conventional banking. However, little empirical evidence is available to support such claims. Using data from Pakistan, where Islamic and conventional banks co-exist, we compare these banks during a financial panic. Our results show that Islamic bank branches are less prone to deposit withdrawals during financial panics, both unconditionally and after controlling for bank characteristics. The Islamic branches of banks that have both Islamic and conventional operations tend to attract (rather than lose) deposits during panics, which suggests a role for religious branding. We also find that Islamic bank branches grant more loans during financial panics and that their lending decisions are less sensitive to changes in deposits. Our findings suggest that greater financial inclusion of faith-based groups may enhance the stability of the banking system.
Does Basel Compliance Matter for Bank Performance?
The global financial crisis underscored the importance of regulation and supervision to a well-functioning banking system that efficiently channels financial resources into investment. In this paper, we contribute to the ongoing policy debate by assessing whether compliance with international regulatory standards and protocols enchances bank operating efficiency. We focus specifically on the adoption of international capital standards and the Basel Core Principles for Effective Bank Supervision (BCP). The relationship between bank efficiency and regulatory compliance is investigated using the (Simar and Wilson 2007) double bootstrapping approach on an international sample of publicly listed banks. Our results indicate that overall BCP compliance, or indeed compliance with any of its individual chapters, has no association with bank efficiency.
