Home Bias in Interbank Lending and Banks’ Resolution Regimes

Abstract:     
In recent years, banks have become increasingly aware of the credit risk borne in lending in the interbank market and they select their counter-parties accordingly. They may also fear that if they come across a bad borrower, rescue plans will be skewed towards domestic creditors; moreover, lenders may prefer to defend their rights in their own regulatory and legal jurisdiction. Using 2004-09 data, this paper argues that these elements, the “resolution edge” of the domestic creditor, contributed to the increase in the home bias of interbank lending by euro-area banks from mid-2007 on, while a more consistent downward pattern emerges in the home bias of banks from five non-euro-area countries (including the US and the UK). The intuition is that when the crisis broke out, euro-area banks reckoned that within-the-area cross-border interbank loans carried a distinct risk compared with domestic loans. By contrast, a large Swiss bank, for example, did not need to wait until 2007 to gauge that its business in New York was a very different matter from a deal in Zürich.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 45

Keywords: home bias, interbank market, euro area, banks resolution procedures

JEL Classification: C33, G11, G15, G21, K20

working papers series