The debate surrounding the drafting and implementation of the new Basel III accord has reignited the debate on the role of bank business models and lending technologies in banking activities, and the way these should be accounted for by regulators. This column explores how banks’ credit market experiences affect their decisions and moral hazards in lending. Banks' prior experience with borrowing firms and co-lenders reinforces their monitoring incentives allowing for a smaller lead share in the lending syndicate. Banks' sectoral experience, in contrast, appears to dilute monitoring incentives, calling for a larger lead share in the lending syndicate.
Financial regulation and banking
The trade-off between stability and growth has long been a subject of policy debate and informs views on the extent to which the supervision of banks should be centralised. This column presents analysis of the ECB’s Single Supervisory Mechanism, using the announcement of the mechanism and its implementation as a quasi-natural experiment. It finds that centralised bank supervision is associated with a decline in lending to firms, which is accompanied by a shift away from intangible investment and towards more cash holdings and higher investment in easily collateralisable physical assets.
Financial sanctions against Russia’s state-owned and controlled banks were imposed consecutively between 2014 and 2019, allowing banks that would potentially be targeted in the future to adjust their international and domestic exposures. This column explores the informational effects of financial sanctions, showing that compared to similar private banks, ‘not yet sanctioned’ financial institutions immediately reduced their foreign assets while, rather unexpectedly, expanding their foreign liabilities. These informational effects crucially depend on geography, with targeted banks located further from Moscow decreasing their foreign assets by more and raising foreign liabilities by less than those located near the Kremlin.
Since the financial crisis, stress tests have become an important supervisory and financial stability tool. Relying on confidential data available at the ECB, this column presents novel evidence that supervisory scrutiny associated with stress testing has a disciplining effect on bank risk. Banks that participated in the 2016 EU-wide stress test subsequently reduced their credit risk relative to banks that were not part of this exercise. Relying on new metrics for supervisory scrutiny, it also shows that the disciplining effect is stronger for banks subject to more intrusive supervisory scrutiny during the stress test.
Monetary policy can stimulate credit provision – and as a result, economic activity – through the purchases of corporate bonds. This column assesses euro area financing conditions and shows they have improved since the announcement of the ECB Corporate Sector Purchase Programme on 10 March 2016, with corporate bond spreads tightening and bond issuance increasing. Moreover, the unconventional monetary policy triggered a shift in bank loan supply in favour of firms that do not have access to bond-based financing.
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