UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS ERASMUS UNVERSITY ROTTERDAM HO CHI MINH CITY INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL STUDIES VIETNAM THE NETHERLANDS VIETNAM – THE NETHERLANDS PROGRAMME FOR M.A IN DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS MACROECONOMIC DETERMINANTS OF CREDIT RISK IN THE ASEAN BANKING SYSTEM BY NGUYEN CHI THANH MASTER OF ARTS IN DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS HO CHI MINH CITY, DECEMBER 2016 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL STUDIES HO CHI MINH CITY THE HAGUE VIETNAM THE NETHERLANDS VIETNAM - NETHERLANDS PROGRAMME FOR M.A IN DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS MACRO ECONOMIC DETERMINANTS OF CREDIT RISK IN THE ASEAN BANKING SYSTEM A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS IN DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS By NGUYEN CHI THANH Academic Supervisor: DR. NGUYEN VU HONG THAI HO CHI MINH CITY, DECEMBER 2016 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com DECLARATION I declare that the wholly and mainly contents and the work presented in this thesis (Macro Economic Determinants of Credit risk in the ASEAN Banking System) are conducted by myself. The work is based on my academic knowledge as well as my review of others’ works and resources, which is always given and mentioned in the reference lists. This thesis has not been previously submitted for any degree or presented to any academic board and has not been published to any sources.
I am hereby responsible for this thesis, the work and the results of my own original research. NGUYEN CHI THANH i LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com ACKNOWLEDGEMENT Here I would like to show my sincere expression of gratitude to thank my supervisor, Dr. Nguyen Vu Hong Thai for his dedicated guideline, understanding and supports during the making of this thesis. His precious academic knowledge and ideas has motivated me for completing this thesis.
Besides, I would like to express my appreciation to the lecturers and staff of the Vietnam – Netherlands Program at University of Economics Ho Chi Minh city for their willingness and priceless time to assist and give me opportunity for this thesis completion. Next, I would like to thank all of my classmates for their encouragement and their hard work, which become a good example for me to do the thesis. I wish all of us will graduate at the same date. Lastly, I would like to express my love to my families for their unlimited supports which has led to the completion of this course research project.
ii LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com ABBREVIATION ASEAN: Association of Southeast Asian Nations DGMM: the difference generalized method of the moments estimator FE & RE: Fixed-effect and Random-effect estimator GDP: Gross domestic product NPLs: Non-performing loans OECD: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development OLS: Ordinary Least Square SGMM: the system generalized method of the moments estimator iii LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com ABSTRACT The impact of credit risk, which is caused by the increase in the non-performing loans (NPLs), on the performance and stability of banking system as well as economic activities have recently raised many interests from researchers and policy makers. Motivated by the close connection between the NPLs and macroeconomic environments as proposed by many researchers, this paper will empirically examine the determinants of non-performing loans in commercial banking systems of the five ASEAN countries in the period of 2002 to 2015. The research uses a sample of 162 banks in these countries with 11 variables of macroeconomic and bank-specific factors and applies the System Generalized Method of Moments estimator (SGMM) for dynamic panel models. The empirical results in this paper indicate that the movement of NPLs in the commercial banks of the five studied countries is associated with both macroeconomic variables and bank-specific factors.
For the macroeconomic condition, an increase in unemployment rate and the appreciation of domestic currency are found to significantly increase the NPLs. In addition, bank with higher returns on asset and leverage ratio and low ratio of equity to total assets will have lower rate of NPLs. Moreover, with the application of additional statistical analyses, the results indicate that the findings of the main model of this paper are consistent and robust. iv LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com CONTENTS DECLARATION.
1 LIST OF TABLES. 2 CHAPTER 1: OVERVIEW OF RESEARCH .5 Hypothesis of the study: .6 The importance of research: .7 Structure of Research:. 8 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEWS. 23 CHAPTER 3: DATA AND METHODOLOGY.2 Econometric methodology – The NPLs measurement: .3 The variables definition and measurement:.
32 v LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.1 The dependent variable – the Non-performing loans: .3 Microeconomic variables – bank-specific determinants: .4 Econometric strategy – The system GMM estimator:. 38 CHAPTER 4: RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONs .2 Unit root tests:. 41 CHAPTER 5: OTHER ANALYSIS AND ROBUSTNESS CHECK. 51 CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION, POLICY IMPLICATIONS & LIMITATIONS OF THE REASEARCH .4 Future research recommendation:.
66 vi LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com APPENDIX Appendix 1: Number of banks in each country Appendix 2: xtabond2 model selection criteria Appendix 3: Correlation of variables Appendix 4: Additional analyses and Robustness checks Appendix 5: Additional analyses and Robustness checks AP Page | 1 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com LIST OF TABLES Table 1: Description of variables Table 2: Summary statistics Table 3: Unit root tests for NPLs estimations variables Table 4: Results with SGMM and fixed-effect estimations Page | 2 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com CHAPTER 1: OVERVIEW OF RESEARCH 1. Introduction: Banks are the financial intermediaries who play an important role in the development of a country. In the financial sector, a commercial bank is a funding channel, which can allocate the cash flows in the economy through their financial services as well as traditional services (taking deposits and make business loans). Whenever a loan is approved, banks gain profits from the borrowers by loan interest rate and services fees.
However, banks would expose to credit risk from this service because borrowers could suddenly lost their abilities to pay the loan in time, namely the non-performing loans (NPLs). The main reason for that comes from the movement of the macroeconomic environment, which directly impacts to the revenues and business activities of bank borrowers. Therefore, this paper will conduct an examination about how the economics determinants affect the bank credit risk. In this chapter, the backgrounds, problem statements, research objectives, research questions, significance of the research and the layouts will be discuss around this issue.1 Backgrounds: Along with the expansion of the economy as well as financial liberalization process in developing countries, the financial sector have been grown with surprising rate.
Besides, the improvements of technology and management procedures help banks making decisions to grow in financial markets. However, the occurrences of two big economic recessions in 1997 and 2007 have significantly affected the banking systems in developing countries. It associated with the deteriorated quality of bank assets due to a massive increase in the NPLs, which has a close connection to the economic cycle. When borrowers are unable to fulfill their obligations to the loans, it would become credit risk of banks, which is one of the significant risks among many kinds of risks that most of the commercial banks are exposed.
Credit risk is distinguished by two components which are systematic and unsystematic credit risk (Castro, 2013) and in fact, it is very hard to set an efficient credit risk management policy and procedure for the banking system. This is because of the unpredictable natures of economic Page | 3 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com environment that have the impacts to banking-specific factors as well as risks in banking industry. Therefore, this impact has raised many serious concerns to researchers and policy makers to understand the relation between credit risk and the business cycle in order to ensure the stability of a banking system.2 Problem statements: The beginning of recent crisis exploded since the collapse of the Lehman Brothers, the fourth-largest U. It is because of the subprime mortgage crisis, many loan defaults makes the bank illiquidity to prevent from the crisis.
Moreover, the depositors do a massive withdraw their money out of the bank as they lost their confidence in the banks. As a result, the bank do not have enough money to do business and indirectly cause the Washington Mutual bankruptcy. Since the Lehman Brother do business around the world, it also leads banks in many countries face the credit risk. Making loan is the traditional function provided by the bank but it also causes the credit risk, which come from the borrowers who are inability to pay back the loans as they promised.
Following to Castro (2013), the increase of bad loans in banks’ balance sheet leads to the problem of liquidity and insolvency, which is the signal for banking crisis. In the case of illiquidity and insolvency, banks will lose their abilities to pay to their debtors and fail to meet their obligations. As a shock have happened, banks will be considered as loss and could be forced to shut down. From there, both banks and their debtors will be struggled by loss and it will effect to economy.
Therefore, it is crucial to raise awareness to the credit risk in order to determine the cause of risks and prevent banks from illiquidity and insolvency problems. Consequently, if banks need to control the credit risk efficiently, they must understand the factors that cause the credit risk. However, as suggestion of Garr (2013), the nature of macroeconomic environment is unforetold and also associates with various microeconomic factors, which makes banks’ credit risk management become a very complicated and tough objective in order to manage the credit risk. Lack of knowledge and experience in credit risk management can leads banks to more serious risks.
Besides, Ratnovski (2013) points a view that credit risk management may become a burden rather than a solution for banks because it could drain a certain amount of Page | 4 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com resources and time of banks. For more specific, the managers also have to put many effort in knowledge and experiences to deal with it and it could raise the administrative cost while a low return on highly liquid assets cannot be compensated the cost. A credit risk program requires time to take effect and resources (such as capital and labors) to be employed and managed for a long time in order to prevent banks from a sudden attack of credit risk. Therefore, if the credit risk policy and procedure are not based on the real situation of the factors that impact to credit risk, they will be loss because their money and time for the costly program are wasted, but also they will suffers a significant raise of the credit risk problems.
As a result, it has led to many interests of researchers and policy makers in finding the factors that can lead to the bank credit risk, so that they can understand these factors and build an effective credit risk management to limit the probability of credit risk.3 Research objectives: The paper will examine the influence of macroeconomic environment factors to the non-performing loans ratio (NPLs) in the five countries of ASEAN (Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippine, Thailand and Vietnam) covering a 13-year period of time from 2002 to 2015, which are in the same development rate in the area. However, due to the lack of NPLs data at countries level, the NPLs ratio of individual commercial bank will be examined and in order to prevent from bias and to ensure the model consistent, other bank-specific factors will be adopted in this paper, there are 162 commercial banks’ information collected. The data for macro determinants is collected from the World Bank data while bank-specific ones is from the Bank Scope-Fitch’s International Bank Database.