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Essays in Empirical Financial Economics
Žigraiová, Diana ; Jakubík, Petr (advisor) ; Witzany, Jiří (referee) ; Teplý, Petr (referee) ; Gächter, Martin (referee)
This dissertation is composed of four essays that empirically investigate three topics in financial economics; financial stress and its leading indicators, the relationship between bank competition and financial stability, and the link between management board composition and bank risk. In the first essay we examine which variables have predictive power for financial stress in 25 OECD countries, using a recently constructed financial stress index. We find that panel models can hardly explain FSI dynamics. Although better results are achieved in country models, our findings suggest that financial stress is hard to predict out-of- sample despite the reasonably good in-sample performance of the models. The second essay develops an early warning framework for assessing systemic risks and predicting systemic events over two horizons of different length on a panel of 14 countries. We build a financial stress index to identify the starting dates of systemic financial crises and select crisis-leading indicators in a two-step approach; we find relevant prediction horizons for each indicator and employ Bayesian model averaging to identify the most useful predictors. We find superior performance of the long-horizon model for the Czech Republic. The theoretical literature gives conflicting predictions on how bank...
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Essays in Empirical Financial Economics
Žigraiová, Diana ; Jakubík, Petr (advisor) ; Witzany, Jiří (referee) ; Teplý, Petr (referee) ; Gächter, Martin (referee)
This dissertation is composed of four essays that empirically investigate three topics in financial economics; financial stress and its leading indicators, the relationship between bank competition and financial stability, and the link between management board composition and bank risk. In the first essay we examine which variables have predictive power for financial stress in 25 OECD countries, using a recently constructed financial stress index. We find that panel models can hardly explain FSI dynamics. Although better results are achieved in country models, our findings suggest that financial stress is hard to predict out-of- sample despite the reasonably good in-sample performance of the models. The second essay develops an early warning framework for assessing systemic risks and predicting systemic events over two horizons of different length on a panel of 14 countries. We build a financial stress index to identify the starting dates of systemic financial crises and select crisis-leading indicators in a two-step approach; we find relevant prediction horizons for each indicator and employ Bayesian model averaging to identify the most useful predictors. We find superior performance of the long-horizon model for the Czech Republic. The theoretical literature gives conflicting predictions on how bank...
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Essays in Empirical Financial Economics
Žigraiová, Diana ; Jakubík, Petr (advisor) ; Witzany, Jiří (referee) ; Teplý, Petr (referee) ; Gächter, Martin (referee)
This dissertation is composed of four essays that empirically investigate three topics in financial economics; financial stress and its leading indicators, the relationship between bank competition and financial stability, and the link between management board composition and bank risk. In the first essay we examine which variables have predictive power for financial stress in 25 OECD countries, using a recently constructed financial stress index. We find that panel models can hardly explain FSI dynamics. Although better results are achieved in country models, our findings suggest that financial stress is hard to predict out-of- sample despite the reasonably good in-sample performance of the models. The second essay develops an early warning framework for assessing systemic risks and predicting systemic events over two horizons of different length on a panel of 14 countries. We build a financial stress index to identify the starting dates of systemic financial crises and select crisis-leading indicators in a two-step approach; we find relevant prediction horizons for each indicator and employ Bayesian model averaging to identify the most useful predictors. We find superior performance of the long-horizon model for the Czech Republic. The theoretical literature gives conflicting predictions on how bank...
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Management Board Composition of Banking Institutions and Bank Risk-Taking: The Case of the Czech Republic
Žigraiová, Diana
The paper investigates how the management board composition of banking institutions affects their risk-taking behavior in the Czech Republic. More specifically, we examine the effect of average director age, the proportion of female directors, the proportion of non-national directors, and director education level on four different bank risk proxies. We build a unique data set comprising selected biographical information on the management board members of Czech financial institutions holding a banking license over the 2001–2012 period. Our most robust finding is that higher proportions of non-national directors increase bank risk as measured by profit volatility and reduce bank stability as captured by the Z-score for the Czech banking sector overall and for the segments of general commercial banks, small and mid-sized banks and adequately capitalized banks. Moreover, we also detect risk-increasing implications of board size for the segments of building societies and small and mid-sized banks. As for average board tenure, its effect on risk-taking varies depending on bank characteristics. We find mixed evidence on the effect of female directors and do not find any strong effect of directors’ age on risk in the Czech banking sector. All in all, the results of our analysis are subject to the proxy of bank risk used. The reader should keep in mind that higher absolute level of bank risk is not necessarily unfavorable as it does not capture if risk-taking behavior is excessive for a given return.
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