Inessa Love's blog

The Financial Sector Assessment Program (FSAP) performs bank stress testing to evaluate the resilience of the banking sector to different unexpected shocks, including sharp changes in the interest rate or exchange rate. In addition to macroeconomic shocks like these, the soundness of the banking sector also depends on the soundness of bank borrowers: systemic shocks to borrowers’ ability to repay loans is transmitted to banks through corporate defaults.

For example, an interest rate shock may affect banks directly, through its impact on the income and expenses from their lending practices. In addition, if the interest rate shock affects borrowers’ ability to repay, the shock will also be transmitted to the banking sector through an increase in corporate defaults. Similarly, a negative shock to corporate earnings will manifest as higher default rates and also adversely affect bank stability.

Assessment of corporate vulnerability thus would strengthen the analysis of bank vulnerability to shocks and should play an important role in bank stress testing. Unfortunately, assessment of corporate vulnerability is rarely included in the FSAP’s standard bank stress testing.

The 2007–08 financial crisis was one of historic dimensions—few would dispute that it was one of the broadest, deepest, and most complex crises since the Great Depression. Initially, however, the crisis seemed to be of rather limited scope, and many thought countries would be able to “decouple” from events in the United States. But after Lehman Brothers collapsed in September 2008, the crisis spread rapidly across institutions, markets, and borders. There were massive failures of financial institutions and a staggering collapse in asset values in developed and developing countries alike. Nonetheless, the reactions of stock markets varied widely around the globe, with some countries showing greater comovement with the US market than others (figure 1).

Together with Tatiana Didier, we empirically investigate the factors that determine comovement between stock market returns in the United States and those in 83 other countries in a recent paper. In particular, we evaluate the extent to which comovement with US stock market returns during this recent turbulent period was driven by real linkages, was driven by financial linkages, or was the consequence of “demonstration effects” (see Goldstein 1998 and Masson 1998), in which investors became aware of vulnerabilities present in the US context and reassessed the risks in other countries, reevaluating the value of their stockholdings.

To promote the registration of new firms, many countries have been undertaking reforms to reduce the costs, days or procedures required to register a business. For example, the World Bank Doing Business report each year identifies the 10 most improved countries on the overall Doing Business index (comprised of 9 subindicators). One of these subindicators measures reforms related to starting a business, with 30-65 countries reforming in this area each year. A still unanswered question is whether some reforms are more important than others. A priori, it is not clear what magnitude of reduction in costs (or days or procedures) is necessary to create a significant impact on firm registration. In other words, what exactly constitutes a reform? Is a 20% reduction in the costs of registration sufficient, or is a 50% reduction necessary to get a substantial number of firms to register?

In a recent paper Leora Klapper and I empirically investigate the magnitude of reform required for a significant impact on the number of new registrations. We use a new dataset that is uniquely suited for this purpose: the World Bank Group Entrepreneurship Snapshots (WBGES), a cross-country, time-series panel dataset on the number of newly registered companies. We supplement it with data from Doing Business reports that contain the cost, time and procedures required for registration of new companies. Importantly, both datasets focus on limited liability companies. In an earlier paper, we used the same dataset to investigate the impact of the global financial crisis on new firm registrations.