This paper analyzes the causes and consequences of credit expansions through the lens of equity prices. In a set of 20 developed countries over the years 1920-2012, bank credit expansion predicts increased crash risk in the bank equity index and equity market index. However, despite the elevated crash risk, bank credit expansion predicts lower rather than higher mean returns of these indices in the subsequent one to eight quarters. In fact, conditional on bank credit expansion of a country exceeding a 95th percentile threshold, the predicted excess return for the bank equity index in the subsequent eight quarters is -23.0%. This joint presence of increased crash risk and negative mean returns presents a challenge to the views that credit expansions are simply caused by either banks acting against the will of shareholders or by elevated risk appetite of shareholders, and instead suggests a need to account for the role of over-optimism or neglect of crash risk by bankers and shareholders.* We are grateful to
We study performance and competition among firms engaging in high-frequency trading (HFT). We construct measures of latency and find that differences in relative latency account for large differences in HFT firms’ trading performance. HFT firms that improve their latency rank due to colocation upgrades see improved trading performance. The stronger performance associated with speed comes through both the short-lived information channel and the risk management channel, and speed is useful for various strategies, including market making and cross-market arbitrage. We find empirical support for many predictions regarding relative latency competition.
We examine historical banking crises through the lens of bank equity declines, which cover a broad sample of episodes of banking distress both with and without banking panics. To do this, we construct a new dataset on bank equity returns and narrative information on banking panics for 46 countries over the period of 1870–2016. We find that even in the absence of panics, large bank equity declines are associated with substantial credit contractions and output gaps. While panics are an important amplification mechanism, our results indicate that panics are not necessary for banking crises to have severe economic consequences. Furthermore, panics tend to be preceded by large bank equity declines, suggesting that panics are the result, rather than the cause, of earlier bank losses. We also use bank equity returns to uncover a number of forgotten historical banking crises and to create a banking crisis chronology that distinguishes between bank equity losses and panics.
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