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This paper studies the country-level reaction of bank credit default swap (“CDS”) spreads and stock prices to bailout announcements in the US and five European countries in October 2008. Bailouts announcements are associated with bank CDS spreads narrowing, both for domestic and foreign banks, pointing to an important role for cross-border exposures. Movements in bank stock prices show mixed reactions, both domestically and cross-border, with banks receiving favorable government support outperforming foreign rivals. By January 2010, bank CDS spreads had stabilized at higher levels reflecting greater default risk, while bank stock prices remained significantly below their pre-crisis levels.

The level as well as fluency of capital supply on the interbank market is crucial for banking sector liquidity. However, the dominance of individual players on this market leads to liquidity imbalance and, thus, might increase the risk for other banks. We test how different bank exposures in interbank market translates into other bank liquidity risk and credit supply. To this end, we use 207 bank exits from interbank markets between 1997 and 2013 in 52 emerging and developed countries. We find that the withdrawal of a bank with high net exposure on interbank market leads to a statistically significant drop in the liquidity position of the remaining banks. The effect is also economically significant. Finally, we find that a liquidity imbalance adversely affects the bank credit supply. Our findings suggest that the consequences are more severe for banks heavily relying on the local interbank market, for emerging countries and surprisingly in pre-crisis periods.

There seems to be a consensus among regulators and scholars that in order to improve the functioning of a banking system and to stimulate bank competition, it is necessary to raise the level of bank information transparency. However, empirical studies which examine the determinants of competition in the financial sector, the effect of competition on financial stability, or the relationship between transparency and bank stability, leave aside the link between transparency and competition. The aim of this paper is to fill this gap in the literature. To test the hypothesis that greater bank information disclosure is associated with lower market power and lower concentration in the banking system, we use country-level data covering 213 countries. The years under consideration are 1998, 2001, 2005 and 2010, which correspond to the years of the World Bank's Banking Regulation and Supervision Survey rounds. Our findings do not always support the conventional wisdom: countries with higher levels of transparency have lower levels of bank concentration, while the link between transparency and competition is less pronounced. The effect from information disclosure grows – for both concentration and market power – with an increase of bank credit risks.

We investigate what accounting information is important for explaining the credit risk for U.S. bank holding corporations (BHCs) during the recent crisis and find that several CAMELS variables are significantly associated with credit default swap (CDS) spreads. Consistent with industry experience, BHCs with more real estate loans do have higher credit risk as measured by CDS spread. With the newly available finer disclosures for the securities account, we find a positive association between risky assets-backed securities (ABS) and CDS spreads. Our results confirm real estate risk as a major risk for U.S. BHCs during the recent financial crisis. Moreover, our study highlights the importance of distinguishing loans/securities investments by type in understanding the relationship between accounting information and bank credit risk. In addition, we do not find significant association between several accounting-based risk measures and the CDS spread, a forward-looking market-based risk measure.

Although state-owned banks are expected to promote the growth of less-developed regions, especially in developing economies, several cross-country studies report that lending by state banks is associated with the inefficient allocation of credit and low levels of development. Further, state banks have been found to lend to their cronies, especially around elections. In this paper, we study the lending activities of state-owned and private banks during the period 1992-2010 and analyze the relationship between the credit these banks provide and local economic growth in Turkey during crisis periods and in election years. We find that the share of state-owned banks in the credit market in crisis periods and local election years is significantly higher than their share in non-crisis and non-election periods. The per capita real credit that state-owned banks provide during crisis years is found to be positively associated with local growth in all provinces. Our results suggest that although state-owned banks might issue loans for political reasons in election periods, they also seem to play an important role in offsetting the adverse effects of economic shocks, especially in developed provinces. © 2012 Elsevier B.V.