Bank Relationships, Business Cycles, and Financial Crises

Author

Galina Hale

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2011-14 | July 1, 2011

The importance of information asymmetries in the capital markets is commonly accepted as one of the main reasons for home bias in investment. We posit that effects of such asymmetries may be reduced through relationships between banks established through bank-to-bank lending and provide evidence to support this claim. To analyze dynamics of formation of such relationships during 1980-2009 time period, we construct a global banking network of 7938 banking institutions from 141 countries. We find that recessions and banking crises tend to have negative effects on the formation of new connections and that these effects are not the same for all countries or all banks. We also find that the global financial crisis of 2008-09 had a large negative impact on the formation of new relationships in the global banking network, especially by large banks that have been previously immune to effects of banking crises and recessions.

Article Citation

Hale, Galina. 2011. “Bank Relationships, Business Cycles, and Financial Crises,” Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Working Paper 2011-14. Available at https://doi.org/10.24148/wp2011-14