Three Essays on Bank Liquidity Creation and Funding Liquidity Risk

According to the modern theory of financial intermediation, liquidity creation is an essential role of banks. Chapter 1 investigates the relationship between diversification of activities conducted by banks and bank liquidity creation. We show that despite the passage of GLBA act in 1999, banks increased their specialization in the traditional loan market and thus became less diversified from 2004 until the end of 2008. In addition, we find evidence that more specialized banks tend to create more excess liquidity during normal times, suggesting too much specialization in mortgage and other types of loans created abundant liquidity leading up to the financial crisis. Chapter 2 calculates the Net Stable Funding Ratio (NSFR) as defined in Basel III for virtually all US commercial banks during the 2001-2013 period. Compared to traditional liquidity risk measures and the NSFR estimated in the related literature, the NSFR based on our calculation is more comprehensive in evaluating funding liquidity risk on banks\u27 balance sheet and off-balance sheet activities and also is superior in capturing the changes in liquidity risk over time. In addition, we graphically show that the deseasonalized and detrended NSFR based on our estimation is able to detect the excessive liquidity risk taking behavior of the banking sector in advance of financial stress. Furthermore, we examine the policy related issue of the effect of stricter capital requirements on bank funding liquidity risk. We find that large and medium banks with higher capital positions tend to increase exposure to liquidity risk during both normal times and the financial crisis. On the other hand, small banks with higher capital ratios tend to have lower liquidity risk exposure. Chapter 3 applies a small variation to the NSFR measure to account for the liquidity risk of brokered deposits and examines the advantage of using the brokered deposits adjusted NSFR (adj.NSFR) in detecting bank financial distress during the period of 2007-2013. The in-sample test results show that the adj.NSFR measure does add significantly incremental explanatory power to the models relying on traditional liquidity ratios. However, its superior ability to identify failures is not so pronounced in the out-of-sample periods