UC Berkeley

Abstract

Essays on Financial Crisis and Institutions

by

Sharon Leona Poczter

Doctor of Philosophy in Business Administration

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Paul Gertler, Chair

In late 2008, economies worldwide underwent close to complete economic paralysis in what has now been established as the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. In response, economic research focused on understanding how a well-developed financial market such as the U.S. could fall victim to a severe financial crisis, behavior typically associated with less-developed economies. While important, the examination of the Great Recession is in some respects limited, as it is impossible to understand the long-term effects of the crisis and subsequent government response without post-crisis data. Further, information regarding the details of the implementation of government policy is typically politically sensitive and therefore not readily available to researchers. For these reasons, the empirical economic literature leaves several first order questions regarding the long term effects of financial crisis and subsequent government response unanswered.

This dissertation hopes to fill that gap. Using micro-level longitudinal data from the Asian financial crisis of 1997 in Indonesia, I closely examine the long term effects of financial crisis and several government policy responses on firms in the financial and real side sectors. While the economic and institutional environment in Indonesia at that time had unique characteristics, similar reforms were carried not only then in other Asian countries, but during the Great Recession in economies worldwide. In particular, I carry out to my knowledge the first empirical assessment of the long term effects of a bank bailout program. This dissertation, therefore, hopes to provide general insight for economies undergoing severe financial distress, not only those in other emerging markets.

Chapter 1 of this dissertation analyzes the long term effects of a bank bailout program on two central policy variables; lending and risk-taking. Using confidential information regarding the selection process of banks for government support, I show that the program was successful at increasing lending but not without increasing the riskiness of investment, even controlling for the amount of lending. This result provides evidence that a bailout policy aimed at simultaneously increasing lending while not engendering increased risk-taking is untenable.

Chapter 2 focuses on how patterns of industry evolution in the manufacturing sector change over a financial crisis. As productivity is seen as key for economic growth, it is important for policymakers to understand which firms survive over a financial crisis, and how survivorship impacts long term industry productivity. If financial crisis facilitates "creative destruction", governments may not want to interfere by financially supporting failing firms. However, if gains to productivity following a crisis are not a direct result of creative destruction, other modes of government intervention may be favorable. Using industry decompositions for the population of manufacturing firms over a fifteen year period, I find that the crisis coincided with dramatic changes in productivity patterns within the manufacturing sector and that many of these changes were sustained in the long run. Further, results indicate that post-crisis growth was largely driven by new entry, providing preliminary evidence that reforms aimed at financially supporting lower productivity firms may be misplaced.

The final chapter looks at the impact of privatization, another policy reform implemented as a response to the crisis, on firm-level productivity. This paper aims to understand if privatization is successful at increasing productivity in the Indonesian context, and also the mechanisms through which privatization leads to changes in efficiency. I find that privatization increases productivity via change in ownership per se, and that an increase in the competitiveness of the environment does not have a significant effect on changes to the efficiency of firms.