Public bank guarantees are widespread across the globe. There has been growing evidence with regards to its effect on risk taking incentives of banks and its countercyclical benefits during a credit crunch. Although real effects of financing constraints have received particular attention over the past years, little is known about the long-term effects of public bank guarantees on labor market outcomes. The 2008 financial crisis and the following recession underscored the role of financing constraints on firm demand and the labor market overall. Recent papers suggest that firms that are hit by a financial shock through their lending institution experience a reduction in employment, in the number of hours worked, and in wages. This observation justifies the role of government induced countercyclical lending and its effect on local labor markets. On the other hand, government interventions on bank lending may hinder creative reallocation/cleansing in the real economy. We plan to study the effects of public bank guarantees on employment outcomes. We address whether the distortions to banks’ credit decisions induced by bank guarantees have an impact on the allocation of labor from the perspective of firm turnover, employment turnover, and job transitions. Bank guarantees are argued to reduce market discipline on banks and their incentives to screen and monitor firms for credit decisions. Through this channel, unproductive firms receive funding which delay the otherwise optimal exit decisions. This mechanism also distorts the efficiency of firm hiring and firing decisions leading to an unproductive employer-employee matching. We plan to investigate whether lack of screening due to bank guarantees induce adverse outcomes in individuals and firms’ labor market turnover. For this we rely on the 2001 decision of European Court of Justice that removed public bank guarantees in Germany as a quasi-natural experiment. This change affected only German public banks as they were protected by a federal government guarantee, while the rest of the banks can be used as a control group. We first plan to develop a theoretical model of labor market with credit constraints, which provides hypotheses about the role of banks' screening decision on allocation of labor. We plan to test the implications of our theory in three steps. First, we investigate whether unproductive firms with higher savings banks dependence prior to the court rule in 2001, experience a change in the exit dynamics after the policy change. Second, we check whether unproductive firms that are more prone to funding through savings banks prior to 2001, experience a change in employment, new job matches, and job separations. Third, we check whether individuals who work in unproductive firms that rely on considerable funding via savings banks prior to 2001, experience faster job separation or job changes after 2001.

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Part 1. Examines the effect of banks financial distress on Canadian household consumption during the 2008/2009 financial crisis. The paper uses a unique identification strategy to show that distressed banks significantly reduced the supply of household non-mortgage credit. For high income/high wealth households this does not result in a reduction of consumption, because these households are able to compensate by drawing down liquid assets. Those households with low incomes or low liquid assets reduce consumption. On aggregate the credit supply effects can explain just over half of the dip in household consumption expenditures in Canada during the 2008/2009 financial crisis.

Part 2: Examines the effect of the real estate bust in the U.S. after the financial crisis on consumption expenditures. The literature has argued that consumption in 20010-20013 did not pick up in the recovery, because households were deleveraging, i.e. reducing their exposure to debt. This is a demand effect. In the paper we show that a supply effects was also at work. We take advantage of the fact that renters were not exposed to the adverse real estate wealth shock to identify supply effects.

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In their annual 10-K reports, the managers of public firms usually include forward-looking disclo-sures, i.e. public statements about their firms' expected future performance, like e.g. future profits or future revenues. Provided that such forward-looking disclosures contain additional information, their release might reduce the information asymmetry between firm insiders and outsiders, and result into better financing terms for a public firm. Prima facie, the information content of forward-looking disclosures is ambiguous, since they are non-verifiable at the moment they are made, and since managers might try to improve the financing terms for their firms via the release of overly optimistic statements. However, misleading external investors via overly optimistic disclosures is costly for a manager: If she fails to live up to investors' optimistic expectations, her firm underlies significant legal risks, potentially resulting into costly lawsuits. Further, since the manager repeatedly interacts with external investors, and since her forward-looking disclosures are verifiable ex post, misleading investors today harms the manager's reputation for making accurate public disclosures. Hence, a manager faces a tradeoff between the immediate gain from an overly optimistic statement today, and the loss in reputation which arises if she does not meet investors' expectations. Our research aims at uncovering the economic factors which affect this tradeoff, and to provide empirical evidence for our findings.

We use an infinitely repeated game-theoretic model with incomplete information in order to examine the economic mechanisms which underlie a manager's forward-looking disclosures. Our model is based on the framework used in Mathis et al (2009), and features as central agent the manager of a public firm who privately observes in each period the quality of a risky investment project. The manager can (but need not) make a forward-looking disclosure about the project's quality in order to attract external finance from imperfectly informed investors. Investors will use the firm's past disclosures for their assessment of the credibility of the manager's public statement. We derive the following results: If forward-looking statements are associated with legal costs, it is not possible to sustain an equilibrium where a manager's disclosures convey no information to investors (like a babbling equilibrium). Further, we find that the managers of opaque and profitable firms are more likely to release forward-looking statements to the public. Under certain conditions on model parameters, their disclosures will be accurate, i.e. they will never mislead external investors.

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The project studies how banks adjust their balance sheets in response to higher capital requirements. In order to increase their capital ratios, banks can adjust their balance sheets in two different ways: They can either increase their levels of regulatory capital (the numerator of the capital ratio), or they can reduce their levels of risk-weighted assets (the denominator of the capital ratio) (Admati et al., 2010). A reduction in risk-weighted assets can entail adverse effects on the real economy if many banks simultaneously decide to sell assets (fire sales) or reduce lending (credit crunch) (Hanson et al., 2011). Empirically identifying the effect of higher capital requirements on banks' balance sheet adjustment faces a number of challenges: Most importantly, one needs to find exogenous variation incapital requirements. Since capital requirements are rather constant, there is little variation

over time; and when they do change, they mostly change for all banks in a given economic region at the same time, leaving no cross-sectional variation to exploit. The project addresses these empirical challenges by exploiting the 2011 capital exercise conducted by the European Banking Authority (EBA) as a natural experiment. The capital exercise required a subset of European banks to reach and maintain a 9 percent core tier 1 capital ratio by the end of June 2012, while other European banks were not subject to this increase in capital requirements. The rule by which banks were selected to be included in the capital exercise allows disentangling the effect of capital requirements from effects associated with bank size. Banks were included in the capital exercise in descending order of their market shares by total assets in each Member State' such that the exercise covered "50% of the national banking sectors in each EU Member State, as expressed in terms of total consolidated
assets as of end of 2010." (EBA, 2011). Since national banking sectors in Europe differ with regard to total size and concentration of market shares, the country-specific selection threshold yields a considerable overlap in size between banks participating and not participating in the capital exercise. These institutional features of the capital exercise allow us to employ a difference-in-difference matching approach to identify the causal effects of higher capital requirements on banks' balance sheet adjustment.

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The internal functions of global banks could be decisive factors in the transmission of shocks both across a country's regions and internationally. However, there is still little knowledge of how the internal organization of these financial conglomerates is connected with their cross-border lending decisions. A major obstacle for such an analysis is the lack of information about the degree to which a parent bank affects the decisions of its foreign subsidiaries. Few studies have focused on confidential information about the activities of the internal capital markets in banking conglomerates (see, for instance, Cetorelli and Goldberg (2012a) and Cetorelli and Goldberg (2012b)), but such information is usually either not available to the general scientific community, or available only for a small number of countries, such as the U.S., which makes the results difficult to apply elsewhere. In the proposed project, we introduce a new measure of bank integration, based on the organizational culture within a global bank, reflected by the strength of the language in its publicly available financial reports. After establishing the validity of this approach for our purposes, we will investigate which social and bank-specific characteristics determine the degree of integration within global banks and whether that degree of integration affects the transmission of solvency and liquidity shocks from parents to their subsidiaries.

We base our method on the General Inquirer Approach developed by Philip Stone and his collaborators (Stone et al. (1966)) at the Harvard Laboratory of Social Relations. The General Inquirer is a computer software that calculates the frequency of appearance of a predefined set of words in a given document. In particular, we use the "Power" category of the Lasswell value dictionary to gauge markers for the prevalence of a language of power, authority and control in 267 annual financial reports of 105 global banks for the years 1997, 2005 and 2012, totaling at 22.4 million words. Then, we calculate our measure of bank integration, the Power Ratio, as the ratio of the number of authority-related words to the total words in the particular document. Since we consider the language of authority to be an indicator of the intrinsic corporate culture within a bank, which is stable across time, we pool all documents for each bank to derive static measures of bank integration, arriving at a cross-section of 105 Power Ratio values. Subsequently, we analyze whether bank integration is determined by individual bank characteristics or by country-related social and economic factors. Our hypothesis is that the degree of centralization of the society from which a bank originates determines how centralized it is in its internal operations. Thereafter, we will focus on the main part of our analysis: whether the degree of bank integration, as measure by the Power Ratio, affects the transmission of parent shocks to domestic and foreign subsidiaries.

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Part 1: Takes advantage of a natural experiment, in which long-standing public guarantees were removed for a set of German banks following a lawsuit. Project identifies the effects of these guarantees on the allocation of credit ("allocative efficiency"). Using matched bank/firm data we find that public guarantees reduce allocative efficiency. With guarantees in place poorly performing firms invest more and maintain higher rates of sales growth. Moreover, firms produce less efficiently in the presence of public guarantees. Consistently, we show that guarantees reduce the likelihood that firms exit the market.

Part 2: We examine the effect of regulatory forbearance during crises on subsequent productivity growth. We estimate regulatory forbearance in different US MSAs and show that subsequent real growth rates, employment rates and other variables related to productivity are higher if forbearance was lower, i.e. more banks during the crisis were closed rather than saved.
Part 3: We examine the effect of redlining rules (i.e. rules that force banks to lend into low income neighbourhoods) on the supply of credit in those neighborhoods and  housing price growth. The identification relies on differences in the level legislation eligible areas (census tracks) due to differences in MSA level household income. We find that that mortgage credit supply and house price growth in the run up to the 2008/2009 financial crisis was higher in eligible areas compared to otherwise similar non-eligible areas. The paper thus identifies "redlining" as one central cause of the financial crisis.

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