Assistant Professor in Finance
School of Management, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
About
I am an Assistant Professor in Finance at the School of Management of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.
My research lies in the areas of banking, financial stability and financial regulation. I study systemic risk, bank risk-taking, and the design of banking supervision — including supranational and cross-border supervisory cooperation — as well as the real effects of financial regulation.
Research & Projects
We estimate expected bail-in costs for an international sample of banks by comparing spreads of credit default swaps (CDS) that only differ in terms of whether they insure against the bailing in of a distressed banks' creditors. Using these estimated bail-in costs we study bank risk taking and the resulting impacts on borrowers. We estimate on average 17% higher CDS spreads due to bail-in, which is higher in riskier countries, in countries with stronger and more independent regulators, as well as after general elections. We find that expected bail-in costs reduce bank risk-taking, consistent with enhanced market discipline. Finally, riskier firms obtain loans with a higher spread, and experience lower investments and asset growth, if they borrow from banks with high bail-in costs.
We examine the effects of cross-border supervisory arbitrage on corporate lending and firm performance. We show that subsidiaries of banking groups improve loan conditions for firms when the group's opportunities to take risks in other countries are curbed. The expansion in lending is targeted towards firms of higher quality and firms that the group is already familiar with. The improved lending conditions have positive real effects, allowing recipient firms to increase capital spending and leading to higher profits. Taken together, our results suggest that there can be benefits for firms in countries that receive lending inflows due to the supervisory arbitrage.
While bank supervisors frequently cooperate across countries, novel data on 268 cooperation agreements reveal that such cooperation falls short of covering the global operations of large banking groups. We show that this causes material regulatory arbitrage: banking groups allocate lending activities and risk into third-country subsidiaries when cooperation agreements cover their operations in other countries. The average distortion in a country's foreign lending caused by regulatory arbitrage is 21 percent, with the effect being magnified in the presence of a weak supervisory framework. Taken together, our results indicate that incompleteness in cooperation substantially diminishes its global effectiveness.
This article examines the effectiveness of cooperation among bank supervisors using novel data on supranational agreements signed by 93 countries. Exploiting that globally operating banks are differently covered by these agreements, we show that supervisory cooperation generally improves bank stability. The magnitude of the effect is higher for smaller global banks, and when supervisors are more stringent and have access to higher quality information. We also show that actual supervisory cooperation varies across countries consistent with differences in economic costs and benefits of cooperation. This suggests that cooperation is not always desirable, despite being effective in reducing bank risk.
Is affiliation with a multibank holding company beneficial for bank stability? We revisit this question by examining the response of market-based risk measures of independent and multibank-holding-company banks to an exogenous negative shock (the 2005 US hurricane season). We find evidence consistent with bank holding companies playing an important role in mitigating negative shocks, with affiliates of more liquid holdings remaining more stable in terms of both systemic and individual stability. We also conduct an event study showing that markets perceive multibank-holding-company banks' dynamics after the shock as value-enhancing.
This paper revisits the mechanism behind the relation between bank competition and systemic risk. I decompose this risk into a component driven by banks' commonality with the market and a component arising from other sources of interbank commonality. I show that competition is negatively related to the latter. This relationship is stronger for more informationally opaque banks, financed with a larger share of uninsured sources and in countries with lower deposit insurance coverage. The findings are consistent with herding incentives at banks when competition is low.
This paper analyzes the net impact of two opposing effects of active risk management at banks on their stability: higher risk-taking incentives and better isolation of credit supply from varying economic conditions. We present a model where banks actively manage their portfolio risk by buying and selling credit protection. We show that anticipation of future risk management opportunities allows banks to operate with riskier balance sheets. However, since they are better insulated from shocks than banks without active risk management, they are less prone to insolvency. Empirical evidence from US bank holding companies broadly supports the theoretical predictions. In particular, we find that active risk management banks were less likely to become insolvent during the crisis of 2007-2009, even though their balance sheets displayed higher risk-taking. These results provide an important message for bank regulation, which has mainly focused on balance-sheet risks when assessing financial stability.
This paper investigates whether the active use of credit derivatives changes bank behavior in the credit market, and how this channel was affected by the crisis of 2007-2009. Our principal finding is that banks with larger gross positions in credit derivatives charge significantly lower corporate loan spreads, while banks' net positions are not consistently related to loan pricing. We argue that this is consistent with banks passing on risk management benefits to corporate borrowers but not with alternative channels through which credit derivative use may affect loan pricing. We also find that the magnitude of the risk management effect remained unchanged during the crisis period of 2007-2009. In addition, banks with larger gross positions in credit derivatives cut their lending by less than other banks during the crisis and have consistently lower loan charge-offs. In sum, our study is suggestive of significant risk management benefits from financial innovations that persist under adverse conditions - that is, when they matter most.
Curriculum Vitae
You can find my full curriculum vitae, including education, positions, teaching and service, here:
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