Narrow Results

We analyze whether bond investors price tail risk exposures of financial institutions using a comprehensive sample of bond issuances by U.S. financial institutions. Although primary bond yield spreads increase with an institution’s own tail risk (expected shortfall), systematic tail risk (marginal expected shortfall) of the institution doesn’t affect its yields. The relationship between yield spreads and tail risk is significantly weaker for depository institutions, large institutions, government-sponsored entities, politically-connected institutions, and in periods following large-scale bailouts of financial institutions. Overall, our results suggest that implicit bailout guarantees of financial institutions can exacerbate moral hazard in bond markets and weaken market discipline.

In this paper, we investigate the role of liquidity in banks lending activity and how liquidity provision is related to bank’s credit risk and others market-based risk measures, such as bank’s implied volatility skew from options traded on the market and realized volatility from futures contract on LIBOR, during periods of global financial distress. Credit risk is given by the ratio between loan loss reserves and total assets and we find that losses from lending activity force banks to build up new liquidity provisions only during the period of financial distress. Liquidity ratio is given by the sum of cash and short-term assets over total assets and we discovered that credit risk reduces liquidity ratio only in bad times, as this demand for liquid asset is suddenly switched on and the more reserves from loan losses the bank has, the more it cleans its balance sheet from long-term commitments in order to replenish its cash and short-term securities. When we control for market-based risk measures, we evidence that both implied volatility skew and LIBOR’s realized volatility are negatively related with the liquidity ratio and are useful in predicting a distress in bank’s liquidity holdings.