3 Issuing costs of state guaranteed bonds - Financial Risk and ...

Annex 7 Linking Bloomberg and Bankscope data
Annex 7 Linking Bloomberg and Bankscope data
Information on parameters which relate to bank performance was downloaded from the
BankScope.
BankScope and Bloomberg do not share a common bank identifier. In light of this, the discussion
below describes the process followed to link the two databases.
Bloomberg identifies the issuer of a bond through two different fields:
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Eqyid
Shortname
Eqyid refers to the issuer’s parent equity, and so relates to a higher organisational level than what
may be an issuing subsidiary. Shortname is a 16-digit abbreviation of the bank’s name.
Shortname was chosen as the appropriate link between the two databases on several grounds.
There are 470 unique shortnames in the bond issuance dataset as opposed to only 334
eqyids, which shows that shortname is the least aggregated of the two identifiers (some
shortnames necessarily refer back to the same eqyid);
189 eqyids are numbers which do not offer any information and would lead to poor
matching with the BankScope database and consequently attrition of the dataset.
As there are no common identifiers, linking the Bloomberg and BankScope databases was based
on the bank names. Shortname from the Bloomberg database was the input in the BankScope
search engine and the results were investigated manually. In the case of several results for the
same bank appearing, the result in which the latest data was made available was chosen. In case
several bank names appear in the list of results, a bank was chosen if other information from
Bloomberg identified it convincingly. Information such as country or eqyid were helpful in
combination with information from company websites, etc.
213 banks that issued bonds eligible for state guarantees were matched with banks in BankScope.
A further 43 banks were matched, but the bonds issued by those institution were not eligible for
state guarantee. Six institutions were not matched.
Database considerations
The BankScope database was chosen for the bank-specific data because it offers information at a
level which is lower in the group hierarchy, than the Bloomberg database whose issuer identifier
may be related to the parent of the actual issuer.
Some of the BankScope variables are, however, incompletely populated. To address this problem,
Bloomberg information for comparable variables was downloaded at the potentially more
aggregated eqyid-level. Unfortunately the Bloomberg variables are even less populated and
therefore the BankScope information is kept for the analysis.