Essays in financial intermediation

Resumen

Financial intermediation helps the economy allocate capital, presumably, in an efficient, safe and rational way (Manove and Padilla, 1999; Coval and Thakor, 2005). This dissertation studies if financial intermediaries behave so. Chapter 1 finds potential inefficiencies. I use loan-level data and bank closures to demonstrate that a distressed bank had overcharged its good-quality customers, and since they had paid these rents, switching must have been even costlier. This serves as a novel estimate of firms’ switching costs and a novel identification of the hold-up problem. In Chapter 2, I match German banks’ FX-denominated balance sheet exposures with transaction-level derivative exposures, and, for the first time, use such detailed data to study banks’ FX risk management. I find limited evidence of hedging, which suggests insufficient risk management. In Chapter 3, I use millisecond-stamped transaction-level stock trading data to show, for the first time, that algorithms trade stocks more rationally than human traders.