IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/wly/soecon/v84y2017i1p181-201.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Understanding the Cyclical Nature of Financial Intermediation Costs

Author

Listed:
  • Matthew Jaremski
  • Ayse Sapci

Abstract

Intermediation costs (i.e., all noninterest bank expenses) are counter‐cyclical and their changes have significant effects at the country‐level; however, the literature is silent on what drives their cyclicality. Previous studies have examined costs using cross‐sectional or low frequency data and thus cannot capture dynamic macroeconomic effects across time. We fill this gap by examining U.S. intermediation costs using a quarterly, bank‐level dataset from 1993 through 2012. This data set allows for the separation of microeconomic and macroeconomic factors affecting the cyclicality of costs. The analysis shows that house prices are the main driving source of this counter‐cyclicality. Because housing is used as collateral, a price decline leads banks to increase their operating costs for monitoring, screening and litigation costs which cause a credit crunch in the economy.

Suggested Citation

  • Matthew Jaremski & Ayse Sapci, 2017. "Understanding the Cyclical Nature of Financial Intermediation Costs," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 84(1), pages 181-201, July.
  • Handle: RePEc:wly:soecon:v:84:y:2017:i:1:p:181-201
    DOI: 10.1002/soej.12222
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1002/soej.12222
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1002/soej.12222?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Thomas Philippon, 2014. "Efficiency and Benefit-Cost Analysis of the Financial System," The Journal of Legal Studies, University of Chicago Press, vol. 43(S2), pages 107-120.
    2. Demirguc, Asli & Huizinga, Harry, 1999. "Determinants of Commercial Bank Interest Margins and Profitability: Some International Evidence," The World Bank Economic Review, World Bank, vol. 13(2), pages 379-408, May.
    3. Thomas Philippon, 2015. "Has the US Finance Industry Become Less Efficient? On the Theory and Measurement of Financial Intermediation," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 105(4), pages 1408-1438, April.
    4. António Antunes & Tiago Cavalcanti & Anne Villamil, 2013. "Costly Intermediation And Consumption Smoothing," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 51(1), pages 459-472, January.
    5. Andrea Ajello, 2016. "Financial Intermediation, Investment Dynamics, and Business Cycle Fluctuations," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 106(8), pages 2256-2303, August.
    6. Demirguc-Kunt, Asli & Laeven, Luc & Levine, Ross, 2004. "Regulations, Market Structure, Institutions, and the Cost of Financial Intermediation," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 36(3), pages 593-622, June.
    7. David C. Wheelock & Paul W. Wilson, 2012. "Do Large Banks Have Lower Costs? New Estimates of Returns to Scale for U.S. Banks," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 44(1), pages 171-199, February.
    8. Bertay, Ata Can & Demirgüç-Kunt, Asli & Huizinga, Harry, 2015. "Bank ownership and credit over the business cycle: Is lending by state banks less procyclical?," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 50(C), pages 326-339.
    9. Demirgüç-Kunt, Asli & Huizinga, Harry, 2010. "Bank activity and funding strategies: The impact on risk and returns," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 98(3), pages 626-650, December.
    10. Bernanke, Ben S. & Gertler, Mark & Gilchrist, Simon, 1999. "The financial accelerator in a quantitative business cycle framework," Handbook of Macroeconomics, in: J. B. Taylor & M. Woodford (ed.), Handbook of Macroeconomics, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 21, pages 1341-1393, Elsevier.
    11. Teresa C Fort & John Haltiwanger & Ron S Jarmin & Javier Miranda, 2013. "How Firms Respond to Business Cycles: The Role of Firm Age and Firm Size," IMF Economic Review, Palgrave Macmillan;International Monetary Fund, vol. 61(3), pages 520-559, August.
    12. Love, Inessa & Zicchino, Lea, 2006. "Financial development and dynamic investment behavior: Evidence from panel VAR," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 46(2), pages 190-210, May.
    13. Hunter, William C & Timme, Stephen G & Yang, Won Keun, 1990. "An Examination of Cost Subadditivity and Multiproduct Production in Large U.S. Banks," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 22(4), pages 504-525, November.
    14. Noulas, Athanasios G & Ray, Subhash C & Miller, Stephen M, 1990. "Returns to Scale and Input Substitution for Large U.S. Banks," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 22(1), pages 94-108, February.
    15. Urban Jermann & Vincenzo Quadrini, 2012. "Erratum: Macroeconomic Effects of Financial Shocks," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 102(2), pages 1186-1186, April.
    16. DeYoung, Robert & Roland, Karin P., 2001. "Product Mix and Earnings Volatility at Commercial Banks: Evidence from a Degree of Total Leverage Model," Journal of Financial Intermediation, Elsevier, vol. 10(1), pages 54-84, January.
    17. Bernanke, Ben S, 1983. "Nonmonetary Effects of the Financial Crisis in Propagation of the Great Depression," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 73(3), pages 257-276, June.
    18. Lane, Philip R., 2003. "The cyclical behaviour of fiscal policy: evidence from the OECD," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 87(12), pages 2661-2675, December.
    19. Urban Jermann & Vincenzo Quadrini, 2012. "Macroeconomic Effects of Financial Shocks," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 102(1), pages 238-271, February.
    20. Barth, James R. & Caprio, Gerard Jr. & Levine, Ross, 2004. "Bank regulation and supervision: what works best?," Journal of Financial Intermediation, Elsevier, vol. 13(2), pages 205-248, April.
    21. Albertazzi, Ugo & Gambacorta, Leonardo, 2009. "Bank profitability and the business cycle," Journal of Financial Stability, Elsevier, vol. 5(4), pages 393-409, December.
    22. Sapci, Ayse, 2017. "Costly financial intermediation and excess consumption volatility," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 51(C), pages 97-114.
    23. McAllister, Patrick H. & McManus, Douglas, 1993. "Resolving the scale efficiency puzzle in banking," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 17(2-3), pages 389-405, April.
    24. Ayse Imrohoroglu & Krishna B. Kumar, 2004. "Intermediation Costs and Capital Flows," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 7(3), pages 586-612, July.
    25. Townsend, Robert M., 1979. "Optimal contracts and competitive markets with costly state verification," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 21(2), pages 265-293, October.
    26. Roger Aliaga‐Díaz & María Pía Olivero, 2011. "The Cyclicality Of Price‐Cost Margins In Banking: An Empirical Analysis Of Its Determinants," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 49(1), pages 26-46, January.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Sapci, Ayse & Miles, Bradley, 2019. "Bank size, returns to scale, and cost efficiency," Journal of Economics and Business, Elsevier, vol. 105(C).
    2. Dindo, Pietro & Modena, Andrea & Pelizzon, Loriana, 2022. "Risk pooling, intermediation efficiency, and the business cycle," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 144(C).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Sapci, Ayse, 2017. "Costly financial intermediation and excess consumption volatility," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 51(C), pages 97-114.
    2. Sapci, Ayse & Miles, Bradley, 2019. "Bank size, returns to scale, and cost efficiency," Journal of Economics and Business, Elsevier, vol. 105(C).
    3. Stijn Claessens & M Ayhan Kose, 2018. "Frontiers of macrofinancial linkages," BIS Papers, Bank for International Settlements, number 95.
    4. Silvestrini, Andrea & Zaghini, Andrea, 2015. "Financial shocks and the real economy in a nonlinear world: From theory to estimation," Journal of Policy Modeling, Elsevier, vol. 37(6), pages 915-929.
    5. Shi, Shouyong, 2015. "Liquidity, assets and business cycles," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 70(C), pages 116-132.
    6. Ikeda, Daisuke, 2020. "Adverse selection, lemons shocks and business cycles," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 115(C), pages 94-112.
    7. Atkeson, Andrew G. & Eisfeldt, Andrea L. & Weill, Pierre-Olivier, 2017. "Measuring the financial soundness of U.S. firms, 1926–2012," Research in Economics, Elsevier, vol. 71(3), pages 613-635.
    8. Andrea Silvestrini & Andrea Zaghini, 2015. "Financial shocks and the real economy in a nonlinear world: a survey of the theoretical and empirical literature," Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) 255, Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area.
    9. Alin Marius ANDRIES & Vasile COCRIS & Silviu Gabriel URSU, 2012. "Determinants Of Bank Performance In Cee Countries," Review of Economic and Business Studies, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, issue 10, pages 165-177, December.
    10. Kame Babilla, Thierry U., 2023. "Digital innovation and financial access for small and medium-sized enterprises in a currency union," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 120(C).
    11. Christopher F Baum & Mustafa Caglayan & Bing Xu, 2017. "The Impact of Uncertainty on Financial Institutions," Boston College Working Papers in Economics 939, Boston College Department of Economics, revised 20 Sep 2018.
    12. Francesco Furlanetto & Francesco Ravazzolo & Samad Sarferaz, 2019. "Identification of Financial Factors in Economic Fluctuations," The Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 129(617), pages 311-337.
    13. Reiter, Michael & Zessner-Spitzenberg, Leopold, 2023. "Long-term bank lending and the transfer of aggregate risk," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 151(C).
    14. Fendoğlu, Salih, 2014. "Optimal monetary policy rules, financial amplification, and uncertain business cycles," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 46(C), pages 271-305.
    15. Wix, Carlo, 2017. "The long-run real effects of banking crises: Firm-level investment dynamics and the role of wage rigidity," SAFE Working Paper Series 189, Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE.
    16. Emanuele Campiglio & Alessandro Spiganti & Anthony Wiskich, 2023. "Clean innovation and heterogeneous financing costs," Working Papers 2023: 07, Department of Economics, University of Venice "Ca' Foscari".
    17. Josef Hollmayr & Michael Kuehl, 2016. "Imperfect Information about Financial Frictions and Consequences for the Business Cycle," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 22, pages 179-207, October.
    18. Cun, Wukuang, 2022. "Endogenous lemons markets and information cycles," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 141(C).
    19. Khanh Ngoc Nguyen, 2019. "Revenue Diversification, Risk and Bank Performance of Vietnamese Commercial Banks," JRFM, MDPI, vol. 12(3), pages 1-21, August.
    20. Moutsianas, Konstantinos A. & Kosmidou, Kyriaki, 2016. "Bank earnings volatility in the UK: Does size matter? A comparison between commercial and investment banks," Research in International Business and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 38(C), pages 137-150.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wly:soecon:v:84:y:2017:i:1:p:181-201. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://doi.org/10.1002/(ISSN)2325-8012 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.