Europe's financial structure has become strongly bank-based-far more so than in other economies. We document that an increase in the size of the banking system relative to equity and private bond markets is associated with more systemic risk and lower economic growth, particularly during housing market crises. We argue that these two phenomena arise owing to an amplification mechanism, by which banks overextend and misallocate credit when asset prices rise, and ration it when they drop. The paper concludes by discussing policy solutions to Europe's "bank bias", which include reducing regulatory favouritism towards banks, while simultaneously supporting the development of securities markets.

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may ABSTRACTThis paper examines the quality of credit ratings assigned to banks in Europe and the United States by the three largest rating agencies over the past two decades. We interpret credit ratings as relative assessments of creditworthiness, and define a new ordinal metric of rating error based on banks' expected default frequencies. Our results suggest that rating agencies assign more positive ratings to large banks and to those institutions more likely to provide the rating agency with additional securities rating business (as indicated by private structured credit origination activity). These competitive distortions are economically significant and help perpetuate the existence of 'too-big-to-fail' banks. We also show that, overall, differential risk weights recommended by the Basel accords for investment grade banks bear no significant relationship to empirical default probabilities. Non-technical summaryCredit ratings play a key role in the financial system, but the determinants of their quality are poorly understood. This paper focuses on the information content of bank credit ratings, which affect the costs of the annual issuance of more than US$600 billion in unsecured bank debt in Europe alone.Our analysis provides the most comprehensive analysis of bank rating quality so far, based on approximately 39,000 quarterly bank ratings over 1990-2011 from Standard and Poor's, Moody's and Fitch. We deploy a new method for evaluating rating quality, which interprets bank credit ratings in a strictly ordinal manner: that is, as relative measures of credit risk. Banks are ranked firstly by their credit rating and secondly by their expected default frequency two years later. The difference between these two ranks is defined as the Ordinal Rating Quality Shortfall (ORQS), which provides a good measure of relative rating error, since it does not require measurements of bank risk to be correct in absolute terms. Moreover, using expected default frequencies directly from Moody's KMV database precludes arbitrariness in modelling choices.Four key findings emerge. First, ordinal rating quality is countercyclical. The (ordinal) information content of credit ratings is higher during banking crises. This finding confirms the prediction of some of the theoretical literature, which posits that the net benefits to rating agencies of providing good quality ratings are lower during peaks in the business cycle.Second, bank rating...

We study the allocation of interest rate risk within the European banking sector using novel data. Banks’ exposure to interest rate risk is small on aggregate, but heterogeneous in the cross-section. Contrary to conventional wisdom, net worth is increasing in interest rates for approximately half of the institutions in our sample. Cross-sectional variation in banks’ exposures is driven by cross-country differences in loan-rate fixation conventions for mortgages. Banks use derivatives to partially hedge on-balance-sheet exposures. Residual exposures imply that changes in interest rates have redistributive effects within the banking sector. Received October 31, 2017; editorial decision August 30, 2018 by Editor Philip Strahan. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.