Claudia M. Buch Knihy

Activities of international banks have been at the core of discussions on the causes and effects of the international financial crisis. Yet, we know little about the actual magnitudes and mechanisms for transmission of liquidity shocks through international banks, including the reasons for heterogeneity in transmission across banks. The International Banking Research Network (IBRN), established in 2012, brings together researchers from around the world with access to micro-data on individual banks to analyze issues pertaining to global banks. This paper summarizes the common methodology and results of empirical studies conducted in 11 countries to explore liquidity risk transmission. Among the main results is, first, that explanatory power of the empirical model is higher for domestic lending than for international lending. Second, how liquidity risk affects bank lending depends on the whether the banks are drawing on official sector liquidity facilities. Third, liquidity management across global banks can be important for liquidity risk transmission into lending. Fourth, there is substantial heterogeneity in the balance sheet characteristics that affect banks responses to liquidity risk. Overall, bank balance sheet characteristics matter for differentiating lending responses across banks mainly in the realm of cross-border lending.

This paper presents the novel results from an internationally coordinated project by the International Banking Research Network (IBRN) on the cross-border transmission of conventional and unconventional monetary policy through banks. Teams from seventeen countries use confidential micro-banking data for the years 2000 through 2015 to explore the international transmission of monetary policies of the U. S., euro area, Japan, and United Kingdom. Two other studies use international data with different degrees of granularity. International spillovers into lending to the private sector do occur, especially for U. S. policies, and bank-specific heterogeneity influences the magnitudes of transmission. The effects are supportive of the international bank lending channel and the portfolio channel of monetary policy transmission. They also show that the frictions that banks face matter; in particular, foreign currency funding and hedging considerations can be a key source of heterogeneity. The forms of bank balance sheet heterogeneity that differentiate spillovers across banks are not uniform across countries. International spillovers into lending can be large for some banks, even while the average international spillovers of policies into nonbank lending generally are not large

In Europe, the financial stability mandate generally rests at the national level. But there is an important exception. Since the establishment of the Banking Union in 2014, the European Central Bank (ECB) can impose stricter regulations than the national regulator. The precondition is that the ECB identifies systemic risks which are not adequately addressed by the macroprudential regulator at the national level. In this paper, we ask whether the drivers of systemic risk differ when applying a national versus a European perspective. We use market data for 80 listed euro-area banks to measure each bank's contribution to systemic risk (SRISK) at the national and the euro-area level. Our research delivers three main findings. First, on average, systemic risk increased during the financial crisis. The difference between systemic risk at the national and the euro-area level is not very large, but there is considerable heterogeneity across countries and banks. Second, an exploration of the drivers of systemic risk shows that a bank’s contribution to systemic risk is positively related to its size and profitability. It decreases in a bank's share of loans to total assets. Third, the qualitative determinants of systemic risk are similar at the national and euro-area level, whereas the quantitative importance of some determinants differs.

The development of macroprudential policy tools has been one of the most significant changes in banking regulation in recent years. In this multi-study initiative of the International Banking Research Network (IBRN), researchers from 15 central banks and 2 international organizations use micro-banking data in conjunction with a novel dataset of prudential instruments to study international spillovers of prudential policy changes for bank lending growth. The collective analysis has three main findings. First, prudential instrument effects sometimes spill over across borders through bank lending. Second, international spillovers vary across prudential instruments and are heterogeneous across banks. Bank-specific factors like balance sheet conditions and business models drive the amplitude and direction of spillovers to lending growth rates. Third, international spillovers of prudential policy on loan growth rates have not been large on average. However, our results tend to underestimate the full effect by focusing on adjustment along the intensive margin and by analyzing a period in which relatively few countries implemented country-specific macroprudential policies.

The global financial crisis has brought to an end a rather unprecedented period of banks international expansion. We analyze the effects of the crisis on international banking. Using a detailed dataset on the international assets of all German banks with foreign affiliates for the years 2002-2011, we study bank internationalization before and during the crisis. Our data allow analyzing not only the international assets of the banks headquarters but also of their foreign affiliates. We show that banks have lowered their international assets, both along the extensive and the intensive margin. This withdrawal from foreign markets is the result of changing market conditions, of policy interventions, and of a weakly increasing sensitivity of banks to financial frictions.