Three Essays on Market Discipline in the Banking Industry

Abstract

This dissertation topic is on the market discipline of banking institutions during the most recent business cycle (i.e., the business cycle surrounding the Great Recession of 2007). Market discipline has been a focal point of banking regulation since the implementation of Basel II in June 2004. In an attempt to provide a comprehensive framework that provides international standards on bank supervision, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision designed a complementary three-pillar structure. These include: capital requirements, the supervisory review process, and market discipline. Recent research has shown that the success of capital requirement ultimately lies in how well it serves market discipline (Gordy and Howells, 2006). The FDIC defines market discipline as: The forces in a free market (without the influence of government regulation) which tend to control and limit the riskiness of a financial institution’s investment and lending activities. Such forces include the concern of depositors for the safety of their deposits and the concern of bank investors for the safety and soundness of their institutions. Source: FDIC Glossary of Definitions Thus, regulators must account for market discipline in their design of a new regulatory framework. In Chapter 1, I investigate how the yield spreads of debt issued by U.S. Systemically Important Banks (SIBs) in the secondary market are associated with their idiosyncratic risk factors, as well as bond features, and macroeconomic factors, over a complete business cycle across the pre-crisis (2003:Q1 to 2007:Q3), crisis (2007:Q4 to 2009:Q2), and post-crisis (2009:Q3 to 2014:Q3) periods. Both Global and Domestic SIBs (G-SIBs and D-SIBs) are considered. Economic theory suggests that as SIB risk-levels increase, bond-buyers demand a higher yield spread (lower price) on the debt security (Evanoff and Wall, 2000). However, explicit and implicit government safety nets before, during, and after the crisis complicate the market discipline mechanism and make a priori predictions of the yield changes in response to increases in risk inconclusive. This renders the issue an empirical exercise. By stratifying across the most recent business cycle, I am able to investigate two broad objectives. First, I study how bond-buyers react to increases in SIB risk across the recent business cycle. Second, I investigate the degree to which the proportion of the variance in yield spreads explained by macroeconomic factors changed across the phases of the cycle. Unusual volatility during and after the financial crisis in the macroeconomic realm, and the keen focus by regulators, investors, and other stakeholders on idiosyncratic risk makes it theoretically unclear which countervailing force is the primary driver of yield spreads in the secondary market. The data includes over 9.7 million bond trades across the 26 SIBs based in the U.S. I obtain several interesting results. First, bond-buyers do react to increases in bank risk factors (leverage, credit risk, inefficiency, lack of profitability, illiquidity, and interest rate risk) by charging higher yield spreads. Second, bond buyer response to risk is sensitive to the phase of the business cycle. Third, the proportion of variance in yield spreads driven by issuing-firm-specific and bond-specific risk factors (as opposed to macroeconomic factors) increased from 29% in the pre-crisis period to 48% and 77% during the crisis and post-crisis periods, respectively. This last finding indicates that market discipline greatly improved in the two latter phases of the business cycle, and while the literature on market discipline following the 2007-2009 crises is still scant, this result is consistent with some extant studies (Balasubramnian and Cyree, 2014). Despite unprecedented accommodative fiscal and monetary policies during and after the financial crisis, market discipline in the secondary bond market has strengthened considerably, providing evidence that regulatory intervention and market discipline can work in tandem. These results can advise regulators, investors, bank risk managers, and others, on how bond traders react to issuing-bank, bond, and macroeconomic factors. For example, regulators and policy makers should account for the effect of market discipline in formulation of their monetary and fiscal policies designed to achieve specific targets because, otherwise, they may miss the targets. In Chapter 2, I study the impact of bank risk taking and macroeconomic factors on the growth of interest-bearing deposits and interest rates paid on those deposits for U.S. commercial banks with less than $10 billion in total assets (known as commercial banking organizations or CBOs). The sample period for deposit growth covers the recent business cycle (2003:Q1 to 2014:Q4) and it is broken down into pre-crisis (2003:Q1 to 2007:Q3), crisis (2007:Q4 to 2009:Q2), and post-crisis (2009:Q3 to 2014:Q4) sub-periods in order to contrast the patterns of effects over these phases of the business cycle. Deposit pricing equations are estimated over the post-crisis period only due to data limitations. Separate deposit growth rate equations are estimated across four deposit types (transaction, savings, large, and small time deposits), while separate deposit pricing equations are estimated across 30 deposit types (including various terms and balances for certificates of deposits as well as personal and business money market accounts and interest checking accounts, among others). Bank heterogeneity is accounted for via fixed effects estimation. I obtain several interesting results. First, there is a relationship between bank risk taking and subsequent deposit withdrawals over the three sub-sample periods, indicating that depositors do respond to bank riskiness under the pre-crisis, crisis, and post-crisis environments (market discipline). Second, there is also market discipline in deposit pricing as evidenced by the statistically significant and consistent relationship between bank risk taking and deposit pricing across all 30 different product types I study. Third, when deposits are disaggregated into insured and uninsured components, I find that the uninsured depositors react to changes in bank credit risk via deposit withdrawals (during the pre-crisis period) and pricing (during the post-crisis period) to a greater extent than do the fully insured depositors, supporting the presence of moral hazard. Fourth, since the pre-crisis period, macroeconomic factors have become even a greater force in driving the changes in deposit growth because of market intervention and implicit and explicit government guarantees. As macroeconomic factors drive more of the variation in deposit growth, mechanisms to keep CBO risk in check depend less on the depositors and banks and more on macroeconomic policy. In Chapter 3, I investigate the impact of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Dodd-Frank) of 2010 on accounting fees for commercial banks with less than $10 billion in total assets (known as commercial banking organizations or CBOs), while controlling for their litigation risk via legal fees spent on outside counsel. Using panel data from 2008 through 2014 for U.S. CBOs, I find that litigation risk is the primary driver of accounting fees for “large” CBOs with $1 billion - $10 billion in total assets. This finding is contrary to previous studies, which attribute the majority of explained variance in those fees to firm size alone. To my knowledge, these results are the first to explicitly confirm the litigation risk-audit fee hypothesis (Seetharaman et al., 2002) for the banking industry. In terms of magnitude, I find that for every one percent increase in legal fees, accounting fees will increase from two to nine basis points, depending on CBO size. Controlling for bank-specific risk and the general business cycle, our results show that Dodd-Frank has the greatest impact on accounting fees for small CBOs (<$500 million in total assets), which experience an increase in these expenses of 73% due to the drafting of the Act, and an increase of 105% due to the subsequent passage (compared to an increase of 56% and 86% in accounting fees for the large CBO cohort during the drafting and subsequent passage of Dodd-Frank, respectively). I also find that a decrease in bank leverage (for CBOs of all sizes) and an increase in real estate loans to total loans (for large CBOs) are indicative of higher accounting fees.