Why were banks better off in the 2001 recession?

In a sharp turnaround from their fortunes in the 1990-91 recession, banks came through the 2001 recession reasonably well. A look at industry and economy-wide developments in the intervening years suggests that banks fared better largely because of more effective risk management. In addition, they benefited from a decline in short-term interest rates and the relative mildness of the 2001 downturn.Bank profits ; Risk management ; Recessions ; Interest rates

Measurement and Estimation of Credit Migration Matrices

Credit migration matrices are cardinal inputs to many risk management applications. Their accurate estimation is therefore critical. We explore three approaches, cohort and two variants of duration—time homogeneous and non-homogeneous—and the resulting differences, both statistically through matrix norms and economically through credit portfolio and credit derivative models. We develop a testing procedure to assess statistically the differences between migration matrices using bootstrap techniques. The method can have substantial economic import: economic credit risk capital differences between economic regimes, recession vs. expansion, can be as large as difference implied by different estimation techniques. Ignoring the efficiency gain inherent in the duration methods by using the cohort method instead is more damaging that making a (possibly false) assumption of time-homogeneity.Credit risk, risk management, matrix norms, bootstrapping, credit derivatives

The New Basel Capital Accord and Questions for Research

The New Basel Accord for bank capital regulation is designed to better align regulatory capital to the underlying risks by encouraging better and more systematic risk management practices, especially in the area of credit risk. We provide an overview of the objectives, analytical foundations and main features of the Accord and then open the door to some research questions provoked by the Accord. We see these questions falling into three groups: what is the impact of the proposal on the global banking system through possible changes in bank behavior; a set of issues around risk analytics such as model validation, correlations and portfolio aggregation, operational risk metrics and relevant summary statistics of a bank’s risk profile; issues brought about by Pillar 2 (supervisory review) and Pillar 3 (public disclosure).Bank capital regulation, risk management, credit risk, operational risk

Firm Heterogeneity and Credit Risk Diversification

This paper considers a simple model of credit risk and derives the limit distribution of losses under different assumptions regarding the structure of systematic and idiosyncratic risks and the nature of firm heterogeneity. The theoretical results obtained indicate that if firm-specific risk exposures (including their default thresholds) are heterogeneous but come from a common parameter distribution, for sufficiently large portfolios there is no scope for further risk reduction through active credit portfolio management. However, if the firm risk exposures are draws from different parameter distributions, say for different sectors or countries, then further risk reduction is possible, even asymptotically, by changing the portfolio weights. In either case, neglecting parameter heterogeneity can lead to underestimation of expected losses. But, once expected losses are controlled for, neglecting parameter heterogeneity can lead to overestimation of risk, whether measured by unexpected loss or value-at-risk. The theoretical results are confirmed empirically using returns and credit ratings for firms in the U.S. and Japan across seven sectors. Ignoring parameter heterogeneity results in far riskier credit portfolios.risk management, correlated defaults, heterogeneity, diversification, portfolio choice

Managing Bank Liquidity Risk: How Deposit-Loan Synergies Vary with Market Conditions

Liquidity risk in banking has been attributed to transactions deposits and their potential to spark runs or panics. We show instead that transactions deposits help banks hedge liquidity risk from unused loan commitments. Bank stock-return volatility increases with unused commitments, but the increase is smaller for banks with high levels of transactions deposits. This deposit-lending risk management synergy becomes more powerful during periods of tight liquidity, when nervous investors move funds into their banks. Our results reverse the standard notion of liquidity risk at banks, where runs from depositors had been seen as the cause of trouble.

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Businessmen's Expectations Are Neither Rational nor Adaptive

A framework which allows for the joint testing of the adaptive and rational expectations hypotheses is presented. We assume joint normality of expectations, realizations and variables in the information set, allowing for parsimonious interpretation of the data; conditional first moments are linear in the conditioning variables, and we can easily recover regression coefficients from them and test simple hypotheses by imposing zero restrictions on these coefficients. The nature of the data, which are responses to business surveys and are all categorical, requires simulation techniques to obtain full information maximum likelihood estimates. We use a latent variable model which allows for the construction of a simple likelihood function. However, this likelihood contains multi-(four)dimensional integrals, requiring simulators to evaluate. Simulated maximum-likelihood estimation is carried out using the Geweke-Hajivassilou-Keane (GHK) method, which is consistent and has low variance. The latter is crucial when maximizing the log-likelihood directly. Identification of the parameters is achieved by placing restrictions on the response thresholds and/or the variances. We find that we can reject both hypotheses. --