We examine the multi-faceted effect of creditor rights on the way banks monitor, operate and finance themselves. We present a simple analytical model that shows that a strengthening of creditor rights reduces the need for banks to monitor their borrowers; and that banks, as a result, tilt their capital structures away from financing that provides the strongest monitoring incentives.
To empirically examine whether this financing is deposits or equity, we use the staggered passage of legal reforms across countries as identifying variation in creditor rights, and find that banks tilt their capital structures away from equity and towards deposits when creditor rights become stronger. These results suggest that bank equity, rather than deposits, is the predominant form of monitoring-inducing financing. Next, we examine how creditor rights and the ensuing increase in bank leverage affect bank risk-taking. We find that increases in creditor rights increase bank risk-taking, but only in countries with government safety nets that encourage risk-shifting, not in countries without such incentives. We also find an increase in banks? cost of debt, but here too only in countries with government safety nets. These results indicate that lenders punish banks? higher risk-shifting propensities with higher costs of debt. Overall, our study sheds light on the complex role of country-level creditor rights on the way banks within the country function, and in doing so, contrasts the effect of creditor rights on banks from that on industrial firms.
The large companies that currently file for Chapter 11 look very different than the typical Chapter 11 cases of the past. The liability side of debtors’...
In recent years, there has been a significant increase in the issuance of sustainability-linked loans (SLLs), where loan contract terms depend on the...
The recent bailout of Credit Suisse is noteworthy for many reasons. One of them is that, while AT1 bondholders were wiped out, shareholders were not. This...