Four Essays on Banks, Firms and Real Effects of Bank Lending

This dissertation collects four essays on banks, firms and real effects of bank lending. Owing to the appliance of different econometric methods on several datasets, insights in the behav-ior of and the impacts from financial markets and market participants are generated. In the first chapter, our results uncover a so far undocumented ability of the interbank market to distinguish between banks of different quality in times of aggregate distress. We show empirical evidence that during the 2007 financial crisis the inability of some banks to roll over their interbank debt was not due to a failure of the interbank market per se but rather to bank-specific shocks affecting banks’ capital, liquidity and credit quality as well as revised bank-level risk perceptions. Relationship banking is not capable of containing these frictions, as hard information seems to dominate soft information. In detail, we explore determinants of the formation and resilience of interbank lending relationships by analyzing an extensive da-taset comprising over 1.9 million interbank relationships of more than 3,500 German banks between 2000 and 2012. The second chapter examines the relationship between central bank funding and credit risk-taking. Employing bank-firm-level data from the German credit registry during 2009:Q1-2014:Q4, we find that banks borrowing from the central bank rebalance their portfolios to-wards ex-ante riskier firms. We further establish that this effect is driven by the ECB’s maturi-ty extensions and that the risk-taking sensitivity of banks borrowing from the ECB is inde-pendent of idiosyncratic bank characteristics. Finally, we show that these shifts in bank lend-ing are associated with an increase in firm-level investment and employment, but also with a deterioration of bank balance sheet quality in the following year. Once we analyze the relationship of banks as lenders vis-à-vis banks as borrowers and banks as lenders vis-à-vis non-financial companies as borrowers, we enlarge the understand-ing of non-financial companies not only in terms of being simply borrowers, respectively sub-jects exhibiting of credit risks. Instead, we try to understand the inner working of those com-panies more generally and analyze their quality not only in terms of a bank’s risk assessment but also in terms of the overall market assessment. However, this in turn can generate infor-mation useable to assess the quality of a bank’s credit portfolio in dimensions that so far are not taken into account by the current regulatory framework. Moreover, a better understanding of banks and non-banks beyond the standard lens of the banking and corporate finance litera-ture might promote new scopes for future research connecting those discrete subjects. In this regard, the third chapter analyzes the dependence of price reactions to corporate insider trad-ing on several measures of corporate governance quality. Our results strongly support the view that first, higher corporate governance levels seem to prevent or discourage insiders from engaging in insider trading as means of opportunistic rent extraction. Second, results confirm the notion of buy and sell trades not being just two sides of the same coin. That is, a higher level of corporate governance leads to a better pre-event information environment which results in less positive abnormal returns after insider buy trades as the incremental posi-tive information revealed by the trade is smaller. In contrast, sell trades in firms with better corporate governance are perceived to convey more valuable and most importantly negative information to the capital market so that prices adjust more for companies with better govern-ance schemes. Third, we show that institutional ownership even on an aggregate level is a sufficient measure to proxy a company’s corporate governance level. Hence, as information on companies’ bylaws and on investors’ investment dedication and type for example are scarce, respectively associated with higher costs because one has to gather that information one can refrain from that and instead proxy the governance level with the aggregate measure of institutional ownership. The latter result is important for carrying out future analyses merg-ing and extending the findings of the first two chapters. Last, the fourth chapter abstracts from borrowers as subjects of credit risk, as well, and most importantly extends the analysis of banks, firms and their interactions effecting each other by a macroeconomic perspective of the real effects of bank lending. That is, as capital flows and real estate are pro-cyclical, and real estate has a substantial weight in economies’ income and wealth Chapter 4 studies the role of real estate markets in the transmission of bank flow shocks to output growth across German cities. In this regard, real sector firms play a central role in the transmission mechanism we uncover. More specifically, the empirical analysis relies on a new and unique matched data set at the city level and the bank-firm level. To measure bank flow shocks, we show that changes in sovereign spreads of Southern Eu-ropean countries (the so-called PIGS spread) can predict German cross-border bank flows. To achieve identification by geographic variation, in addition to a traditional supply-side varia-ble, we use a novel instrument that exploits a policy assigning refugee immigrants to munici-palities on an exogenous basis. We find that output growth responds more to bank flow shocks in cities that are more exposed to tightness in local real estate markets. We estimate that, during the 2009-2014 period, for every 100-basis point increase in the PIGS spread, the most exposed cities grow 15-2 basis points more than the least exposed ones. Moreover, the differential response of commercial property prices can explain most of this growth differen-tial. When we unpack the transmission mechanism by using matched bank-firm-level data on credit, employment, capital expenditure and TFP, we find that firm real estate collateral as measured by tangible fixed assets plays a critical role. In particular, bank flow shocks in-crease the credit supply to firms and sectors with more real estate collateral. Higher credit supply then leads firms to hire and invest more, without evidence of capital misallocation