Essays on bank behaviour and financial regulation

Defence date: 18 January 2019Examining Board: Prof. Juan Dolado, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Supervisor; Prof. Árpád Ábrahám, EUI; Prof. Tobias Berg, Frankfurt School of Finance & Management; Prof. Enrico Sette, Bank of Italy.This thesis studies bank behaviour in response to financial regulation and monetary policy. In the first chapter a novel approach to address issues of endogeneity in estimating a causal effect of leverage on risk taking by banks is used. By using data on local bank office deposits and local unemployment an instrument is constructed to use in a regression of leverage on a measure of risk taking constructed from new issuance of loans. The results are consistent with a theoretical prediction that due to limited liability banks increase their risk taking after an exogenous increase in leverage. The second chapter estimates the effect of deposit insurance on the risk-taking behaviour of banks. As shown in the theoretical literature, deposit insurance may induce moral hazard and incentivise banks to take on more risk. This chapter provides an experimental setup in which an increase in the coverage limit of deposit insurance in the U.S. is exploited in order to identify the difference in risk taking by banks that were affected and banks that were not. This difference comes from the fact that state chartered savings banks in Massachusetts had unlimited deposit insurance coverage at the time when it was increased for all other banks in the US. Given that all banks in the sample are subject to the same regulatory and supervisory requirements, and that they are similar in other characteristics, the effect of such increase in deposit insurance can be isolated. The findings suggest that, contrary to the literature, an increase in deposit insurance did not increase bank risk-taking, nor did it affect market discipline, evident through a lack of effect on deposit rates. Motivated by substantial differences in employment dynamics across different geographical areas and substantial differences across banks which operate in these geographical areas, the third chapter estimates the effect of characteristics of banks operating in a particular location on the impact of monetary policy on the local economic outcomes. The results suggest that the effect of monetary policy on local employment and local total payroll intensifies as the capital structure of local banks improves and the credit risk associated with local banks decreases. These findings go in line with a prediction that healthy banks find it easier to attain alternative sources of funding following a monetary tightening. The results also show that size and liquidity position of local banks does not affect the impact of monetary policy.--1 Bank Funding and Risk Taking (Chapter 1: co-authored Alessandro Ferrari, Carmen García Galindo and Andreas Winkler) --2 Deposit Insurance and Bank Risk Taking (Chapter 2: co-authored Carolina López-Quiles) --3 Local Effects of Monetary Polic