Abstract
We investigate the return and volatility interdependencies among the US, the UK, the EU, and Japanese banks and insurers during the period of 2003 to 2009. We find strong return and volatility transmissions within and across banking and insurance industries, strengthened contagious spillover effects during the crisis of 2007 to 2009, and a leading role played by the US financial institutions as information providers in global markets. Furthermore, we find that firm characteristics such as size and leverage drive the interdependencies among major banking firms. Our findings have important implications for effective hedging and diversification strategies, asset pricing and risk management, and the formulation of regulatory and monetary policies.
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Notes
Deregulatory acts in the US financial markets include the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act (1980), the Competitive Equality in Banking Act (1987), the Financial Institutions Reform Recovery and Enforcement Act (1989) and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (1999).
See the report on Consolidation in the Financial Sector (2001) available from the Bank for International Settlements website (www.bis.org). Smith and Walter (1998) have documented the increasing trend in cross-border mergers and acquisitions during the late 1980s until the late 1990s across both developed and emerging economies. Details on the domestic and global mergers and acquisitions of financial institutions across developed countries during 1990 to 1999 are given in the IMF Group of Ten: Report on Consolidation in the Financial Sector (2001).
The recent crisis had two phases, it started as a sub-prime mortgage crisis in the U.S. housing market in early 2007 and then transformed into a global financial meltdown in the later part of 2008 (Eichengreen et al. 2012). Extant studies fail to cover the entire crisis period. For instance, Pukthuanthong and Roll (2009) examine the contagion effects of this crisis among 81 countries, but their sample period ends in February 2008.
Several studies examine the spillover effects among regional markets (e.g., European, Latin American, and Asian markets in Bekaert et al., 2005) by investigating the influence of these markets on an individual national market. However, conventional regional indices contain all national market indices within the region, which introduces bias into the analysis of spillover effects. Modified regional indices do exclude the country under examination from the index (Asgharian and Nossman 2011; Bartram et al. 2007).
The 2010 Global Financial Stability Report by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) reveals that the combined EU, Japanese, UK, and US banking assets amount to over 60 % of the global banking industry. The 2010 SIGMA report by Swiss Re also shows that over 75 % of the insurance premiums in 2009 were generated by the North American, Western European, and Japanese insurers.
On April 2, 2007, the largest US subprime lender, New Century Financial, filed for bankruptcy. On March 9, 2009, the major equity markets reached their lowest levels during the crisis period and recorded the biggest single day rally since 2007 on the following day.
The expected impacts of the risk factors on portfolio returns are available on request.
The variance inflation factors (VIF) for the exogenous variables (F t , R * t ) in the mean equation (1) are in the range of 1.2 to 2.1, well below the critical value of 10. Multicollinearity can also be largely ruled out for the regressors in the variance equation (2) because the VIFs for the fitted variances (H t-1 , H * t ) are below the critical value for 12 out of 14 of the sector portfolios. Only in two cases is the VIF high during the crisis period.
The common creditors are “global investors”, for instance institutional investors, who concurrently operate in different markets and shift their investments in search of assets with higher liquidity (Vayanos 2004), better credit quality (Eichengreen et al. 2012), or international diversification of their financial portfolios.
The likelihood ratio test is carried out by assessing the difference in the log-likelihood ratios of the unrestricted and restricted versions of the model (equations 1 and 2) according to a given hypothesis.
The estimates for parameter matrices A and B in equation (2), driving the evolution of the covariance matrix, are available on request. As a robustness check we also present the estimated parameters obtained from the baseline VAR-BEKK model with no spillover effects in the conditional variance (G = Z = 0). These results largely coincide with the ones from equation (2). This similarity serves to alleviate the concerns regarding the adverse effects of the contemporaneous correlation among the fitted variances of the different portfolios on the latter specification.
To obtain the magnitude of the spillover during the crisis period, the coefficients obtained for the pre-crisis period and the interaction term for the crisis period should be added up.
The values reported for the cross-market spillover effects are per 1 unit change in the same or a different industry.
It is notable that the economic condition during the sample period of 1988 to 1995, adopted by Karolyi and Stulz (1996) and Peek and Rosengren (1997) is different from ours. In the late 1980s, Japanese banks were the main credit supplier to the US economy (Peek and Rosengren 1997). Therefore, shocks in the Japanese banking sector had a positive impact on the US financial market as the former directly influenced the liquidity condition in the latter. However, after the deep recession experienced by Japan in the early 1990s, Japanese financial intermediaries no longer played a dominant role in global financial markets. It is also possible that the nature of return generating models used in earlier studies in which the volatility interaction dynamics are ignored, biases the measurement of the shock transmission effects. Indeed, the return spillovers might be an artifact of volatility interdependence.
The data from the Japanese Bankers Association show that, on average, more than 68 % of the Japanese banking assets is financed by retail deposits over the sample period. Backus et al. (2009) show that the Japanese saving rate was more than 30 % of their GDP for most of the period from 1960 to 2004. In contrast, the US national saving rate was only around 15 % and dropped by almost 50 % in the late 1990s (Page 21, Fig. 1).
De Nicoló et al. (2004) suggest that retail deposits are the fundamental funding channel in a financial system, which is more reliable and stable compared to wholesale money market instruments. Therefore, banks financed through retail deposits enjoy a lower funding risk.
Elyasiani et al. (2007) find similar results based on the spillover effects among the US financial institutions.
Details regarding the identification of the SIFIs can be found in the Financial Stability Board report, Policy Measures to Address Systemically Important Financial Institutions (November 4, 2011).
We use the ratio (deposits from other banks plus other deposits and short-term borrowing)/(total deposits plus money market and short-term funding) as proxy for funding fragility (Demirguc-Kunt and Huizinga 2010).
The regulation relating to mark-to-market (or fair-value) accounting was introduced under the Statement of Financial Accounting Standards No. 157: Fair Value Measurement (FAS 157), which was issued by the US Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB). Further discussion on the fair value accounting rule and its impact on the current financial crisis can be found in the IMF Global Financial Stability Report (2008).
Although “total assets” is highly significant in the univariate model, its high correlation with other variables such as leverage prompted the use of the size dummy and market capitalization instead, as proxies for size.
The number of cross-regional bank pairs is reduced to 184 from the initial 218 due to missing CDS and gross loan data for two SIFIs (Goldman Sachs, State Street) in our sample. In order to adjust for large cross-sectional variations in the similarity measure of short-term funding ratio, funding fragility, loans, and income diversity, we use logarithms. The total assets and Tier 1 capital ratio distance measures and the CDS spread correlation are excluded from the binary probit model as they are highly correlated with other explanatory variables.
According to the Financial Stability Report 2008 issued by the Bank of England, the UK and US banks had $192 and $195 billion invested in structured products. The common holding of these products by banks in other regions strengthened the potential for co-movement among these institutions and markets. Since investment in structured products was concentrated within SIFIs, it was conducive to stronger spillover between these banks.
A breakdown of the results by type of insurance business is available from the authors on request.
Insurance-linked securities (ILS) are a special type of asset-backed security issued by insurers and reinsurers to enhance their funding ability and to transfer their underwriting risk to capital markets. There are many different products that can be categorized as ILS, such as a CAT-bond, CAT-option, sidecars, CAT-equity puts, catastrophic risk swaps, industry loss warranties, and weather derivatives (Cummins 2005).
The holding of real estate loan comes mainly from the non-life insurance sector. The data are collected from the SIGMA – Insurance Investment in a Challenging Global Environment (2010) report by Swiss Re. See also the documents issued by the Association of British Insurers (ABI) including the U.K. Insurance – Key Facts and the Annual General Insurance Overview Statistics; available at www.abi.org.uk.
The report is titled Systemic Risk in Insurance. An analysis of insurance and financial stability (March 2010).
Based on a report by the U.S. Treasury titled Financial Stability Transactions Report (July 2009).
For industrial reports, please refer to report Systemic Risk in Insurance, An analysis of insurance and financial stability (2010) by Geneva Association, and the report Eight Key Messages on the Financial Turmoil (2008) by CEA. Both reports claim that insurers are less exposed to the credit risk and liquidity risk compared to banks, and the insurance industry is less involved in the mortgage related security market. For empirical studies, please refer to Harrington (2009) and Eling and Schmeiser (2010) among others.
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Acknowledgments
The first author is also a visiting professor and dean’s scholar at the Jerusalem School of Business, Hebrew University and a Fellow at the Wharton Financial Institution Center, University of Pennsylvania. He gratefully acknowledges a Summer Research Grant from Temple University. The second and third authors are also visiting scholars at ALBA Graduate Business School, Athens 11528, Greece. The authors would like to thank Warren Bailey, the co-editor, and an anonymous referee of the Journal for their constructive feedback, Keith Cuthbertson and John Montgomery for their helpful discussions, as well as participants at the following conferences for their useful comments: FMA European Conferences in Hamburg 2010, Porto 2011, Istanbul 2012 and Luxembourg 2013; the Financial Markets & Institutions Group within the British Accounting & Finance Association, Aston 2011; the International Finance & Banking Society (IFABS), Rome 2011 and Valencia 2012; the FMA Annual Meeting, Denver 2011; and the Banking, Finance, Money and Institutions: The Post Crisis Era Conference, University of Surrey 2013. Special thanks are due to Ling Zhang for excellent research assistance. The usual disclaimer applies.
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Elyasiani, E., Kalotychou, E., Staikouras, S.K. et al. Return and Volatility Spillover among Banks and Insurers: Evidence from Pre-Crisis and Crisis Periods. J Financ Serv Res 48, 21–52 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10693-014-0200-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10693-014-0200-z