Bank stock returns and economic growth

Previous research has established (i) that a country’s financial sector influence future economic growth and (ii) that stock market index returns affect future economic growth. We extend and tie together these two strands of the growth literature by analyzing the relationship between banking industry stock returns and future economic growth. Using dynamic panel techniques to analyze panel data from 18 developed and 18 emerging markets, we find a positive and significant relationship between bank stock returns and future GDP growth that is independent of the previously documented relationship between market index returns and economic growth. We also find that much of the informational content of bank stock returns is captured by country-specific and institutional characteristics, such as bank-accounting-disclosure standards, banking crises, enforcement of insider trading law and government ownership of banks.     

Bank activity and funding strategies: The impact on risk and returns

This paper examines the implications of bank activity and short-term funding strategies for bank risk and return using an international sample of 1,334 banks in 101 countries leading up to the 2008 financial crisis. Expansion into noninterest income-generating activities such as trading increases the rate of return on assets, and it could offer some risk diversification benefits at very low levels. Nondeposit, wholesale funding in contrast lowers the rate of return on assets, while it can offer some risk reduction at commonly observed low levels of nondeposit funding. A sizable proportion of banks, however, attract most of their short-term funding in the form of nondeposits at a cost of enhanced bank fragility. Overall, banking strategies that rely prominently on generating noninterest income or attracting nondeposit funding are very risky, consistent with the demise of the US investment banking sector.     

The return to retail and the performance of US banks

The US banking industry is experiencing a renewed focus on retail banking, a trend often attributed to the stability and profitability of retail activities. This paper examines the impact of banks’ retail intensity on performance from 1997 to 2004 by developing three complementary definitions of retail intensity (retail loan share, retail deposit share, and branches per dollar of assets) and comparing these measures with both equity market and accounting measures of performance. We find that an increased focus on retail banking across US banks is linked with significantly lower equity market and accounting returns for all banks, but lower volatility for only the largest banking companies. We conclude that retail banking may be a relatively stable activity, but it is also a low return one.     

The effects of loan portfolio concentration on Brazilian banks’ return and risk

This paper tests whether diversification of the credit portfolio at the bank level leads to better performance and lower risk. We employ a new high frequency (monthly) panel data for the Brazilian banking system with information at the bank level for loans by economic sector. We find that loan portfolio concentration increases returns and also reduces default risk; the impact of concentration on bank’s return is decreasing on bank’s risk; there are significant size effects; foreign and state-owned banks seem to be less affected by the degree of diversification. An important additional finding is that there is an increasing concentration trend after the breakout of the recent international financial crisis, specially after the failure of Lehman Brothers.     

Asset Pricing with a Bank Risk Factor

This paper studies how the state of the banking sector influences stock returns of nonfinancial firms. We consider a two‐factor pricing model, where the first factor is the traditional market excess return and the second factor is the change in the average distance to default of commercial banks. We find that this bank factor is priced in the cross section of U.S. nonfinancial firms. Controlling for market beta, the expected excess return for a stock in the top quintile of bank risk exposure is on average 2.83% higher than for a stock in the bottom quintile.     

Geographic Deregulation and Competition in the U.S. Banking Industry

We examine the effects of geographic deregulation on state‐level competition in U.S. banking markets over the period 1976‐2005. The empirical results confirm that the U.S. banks in general operated under monopolistic competition during the period examined. After partitioning the sample based on bank size we find that the market competition for large banks in Delaware, Oregon, and Rhode Island can be characterized as monopolistic while small banks in Arizona and Massachusetts seem to have operated under the conditions of perfect competition. The removal of geographic restrictions appears to have very limited and non‐uniform effect on state‐level competitive conduct. There is some evidence that the U.S. banking industry might have actually experienced a less competitive behavior in recent years due to increased market power of larger banks.     

Risk factor and industry effects in the cross-country comovement of momentum returns

This paper examines the sources of cross-country comovement of momentum returns over the 1975–2004 period. Using data on more than 17,000 individual firms across 100 industries from 40 countries, we document the profitability of country-neutral individual firm, industry, and industry-adjusted return momentum. We show that country-neutral momentum returns are significantly correlated across countries, the correlation is time-varying, and that comovement among industries cannot explain the comovement of country-neutral momentum returns. However, we find that standard risk factor models do explain a significant portion of the cross-country comovement of momentum returns, even though they do not explain average momentum returns.     

Cross-section of option returns and volatility

We study the cross-section of stock option returns by sorting stocks on the difference between historical realized volatility and at-the-money implied volatility. We find that a zero-cost trading strategy that is long (short) in the portfolio with a large positive (negative) difference between these two volatility measures produces an economically and statistically significant average monthly return. The results are robust to different market conditions, to stock risks-characteristics, to various industry groupings, to option liquidity characteristics, and are not explained by usual risk factor models.     

Noninterest Income and Financial Performance at U.S. Commercial Banks

Noninterest income now accounts for over 40% of operating income in the U.S. commercial banking industry. This paper demonstrates a number of empirical links between bank noninterest income, business strategies, market conditions, technological change, and financial performance between 1989 and 2001. The results indicate that well‐managed banks expand more slowly into noninterest activities, and that marginal increases in noninterest income are associated with poorer risk‐return tradeoffs on average. These findings suggest that noninterest income is coexisting with, rather than replacing, interest income from the intermediation activities that remain banks' core financial services function.     

The sensitivity of bank stock returns to real estate

According to the Federal Reserve Board, banking firms have recently been shifting significantly larger portions of their loan portfolios into real estate. This increase in real estate lending has caused concern about the continuing economic health of banks on the part of state and federal regulators, since changes in real estate returns, evidenced by changes in property value, can potentially have a significant impact on bank default risk and profit-ability. However, concerned parties do not seem to have explicitly considered the relationship between mortgage default risk and the specific characteristics of real estate investments.This study examines the sensitivities of stock returns for different bank groups, based on the percentage of total loans in real estate and the percentage of loans in five different mortgage categories (construction and development loans, farmland loans, one- to four-family residential loans, multifamily residential loans, and nonresidential and nonfarm loans), to changes in real estate market returns. This is done by developing and using a three-index model.The results of this study indicate that bank stocks, overall, are very sensitive to changes in real estae returns. Banks, with a larger portion of their total loans invested in all types of real estate loans, except farmland loans, are most sensitive to changes in real estate returns.     

Delayed Expected Loss Recognition and the Risk Profile of Banks

This paper investigates the extent to which delayed expected loan loss recognition (DELR) is associated with greater vulnerability of banks to three distinct dimensions of risk: (1) stock market liquidity risk, (2) downside tail risk of individual banks, and (3) codependence of downside tail risk among banks. We hypothesize that DELR increases vulnerability to downside risk by creating expected loss overhangs that threaten future capital adequacy and by degrading bank transparency, which increases financing frictions and opportunities for risk‐shifting. We find that DELR is associated with higher correlations between bank‐level illiquidity and both aggregate banking sector illiquidity and market returns (i.e., higher liquidity risks) during recessions, suggesting that high DELR banks as a group may simultaneously face elevated financing frictions and enhanced opportunities for risk‐shifting behavior in crisis periods. With respect to downside risk, we find that during recessions DELR is associated with significantly higher risk of individual banks suffering severe drops in their equity values, where this association is magnified for banks with low capital levels. Consistent with increased systemic risk, we find that DELR is associated with significantly higher codependence between downside risk of individual banks and downside risk of the banking sector. We theorize that downside risk vulnerability at the individual bank level can translate into systemic risk by virtue of DELR creating a common source of risk vulnerability across high DELR banks simultaneously, which leads to risk codependence among banks and systemic effects from banks acting as part of a herd.     

Competition and risk‐taking in investment banking

How does competition affect the investment banking business and the risks individual institutions are exposed to? Using a large sample of investment banks operating in seven developed economies over 1997–2014, we apply a panel VAR model to examine the relationships between competition and risk without assuming any a priori restrictions. Our main finding is that investment banks’ higher risk exposure, measured as a long‐term capital‐at‐risk and return volatility, was facilitated by greater competitive pressures for both boutique investment banks and full‐service investment banks. Overall, we find some evidence that more competition leads to more fragility before and during the recent financial crisis.     

Ownership structure and risk in publicly held and privately owned banks

Using detailed ownership data for a sample of European commercial banks, we analyze the link between ownership structure and risk in both privately owned and publicly held banks. We consider five categories of shareholders that are specific to our dataset. We find that ownership structure is significant in explaining risk differences but mainly for privately owned banks. A higher equity stake of either individuals/families or banking institutions is associated with a decrease in asset risk and default risk. In addition, institutional investors and non-financial companies impose the riskiest strategies when they hold higher stakes. For publicly held banks, changes in ownership structure do not affect risk taking. Market forces seem to align the risk-taking behavior of publicly held banks, such that ownership structure is no longer a determinant in explaining risk differences. However, higher stakes of banking institutions in publicly held banks are associated with lower credit and default risk.     

The impact of off-balance-sheet activities on banks returns: An application of the ARCH-M to Canadian data

This paper revisits the impact of off-balance-sheet (OBS) activities on banks risk-return trade-off. Recent studies (e.g., Stiroh and Rumble, 2006) show that increasing OBS activities does not necessarily yield straightforward diversification benefits for banks. However, introducing a risk premium in the standard banks returns models, and resorting to an ARCH-M procedure, Canadian data suggest that banks risk-return trade-off displays a structural break around 1997. In the second subperiod of our sample (1997–2007), we find that the noninterest income generated by OBS activities no longer impacts banks returns negatively. While during the first period (1988–1996) the volatility variable is not significant in any returns equations, a risk premium eventually emerges, pricing the risk associated to OBS activities.     

Higher risk,lower returns: What hedge fund investors really earn

The returns of hedge fund investors depend not only on the returns of the funds they hold but also on the timing and magnitude of their capital flows in and out of these funds. We use dollar-weighted returns (a form of Internal Rate of Return (IRR)) to assess the properties of actual investor returns on hedge funds and compare them to buy-and-hold fund returns. Our main finding is that annualized dollar-weighted returns are on the magnitude of 3% to 7% lower than corresponding buy-and-hold fund returns. Using factor models of risk and the estimated dollar-weighted performance gap, we find that the real alpha of hedge fund investors is close to zero. In absolute terms, dollar-weighted returns are reliably lower than the return on the Standard & Poor's (S&P) 500 index, and are only marginally higher than the risk-free rate as of the end of 2008. The combined impression from these results is that the return experience of hedge fund investors is much worse than previously thought.     

Convergence and risk-return linkages across financial service firms

We examine the risk and return linkages across US commercial banks, securities firms, and life insurance companies during the 1991–2001 period. After controlling for changes in the broader stock market, interest rates, and foreign currency values, we find that return and risk interdependencies across these financial firms are significant and size-varying; larger institutions display stronger volatility transmission linkages, while smaller ones exhibit more prominent return-related linkages. The tighter link in risk among large financial institutions (FIs) suggests stronger convergence, employment of common models of risk measurement and risk management, and more intense inter-industry competition, particularly between large banks and large securities firms, compared to smaller institutions. Lack of risk spillover among smaller FIs confirms the intuition that they typically assume more localized and idiosyncratic risk. The co-movement of stock returns among smaller FIs has been helped by the effects of locally based factors, such as economic conditions and state regulations, on all such institutions, and a less diversified product set. Differences in spillover patterns between large and smaller institutions have implications on investment choices and mergers and acquisitions in the industry. Introduction of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (1999) has had dissimilar effects on the riskiness of large versus smaller life insurance and securities firms, and an insignificant effect on commercial banks.     

Systematic risk and the cross section of hedge fund returns

This paper investigates the extent to which market risk, residual risk, and tail risk explain the cross-sectional dispersion in hedge fund returns. The paper introduces a comprehensive measure of systematic risk (SR) for individual hedge funds by breaking up total risk into systematic and fund-specific or residual risk components. Contrary to the popular understanding that hedge funds are market neutral, we find that systematic risk is a highly significant factor explaining the dispersion of cross-sectional returns while at the same time measures of residual risk and tail risk seem to have little explanatory power. Funds in the highest SR quintile generate 6% more average annual returns compared with funds in the lowest SR quintile. After controlling for a large set of fund characteristics and risk factors, systematic risk remains positive and highly significant, whereas the relation between residual risk and future fund returns continues to be insignificant. Hence, systematic risk is a powerful determinant of the cross-sectional differences in hedge fund returns.     

Banking industry volatility and economic growth

Utilizing the recent dynamic panel GMM estimation techniques for 36 markets, this research investigates the relationship between banking industry volatility and future economic growth, and provides empirical evidence complementary to Cole et al. (2008) who examine the finance-growth nexus from a unique asset pricing theory perspective and document a positive relationship between bank stock returns and future economic growth that is significantly influenced by a series of country-specific and banking institutional characteristics. We find that the negative link between banking industry volatility and future economic growth is significantly affected by government ownership of banks, the enforcement of the insider trading law, systemic banking crises, and bank accounting disclosure standards, while the impact of financial development is ambiguous. The significant results are primarily driven by the data from emerging markets.     

A note on deposit rate deregulation, Super NOWs, and bank security returns

This paper empirically investigates the effects on the weekly returns of almost 100 banking organizations of the December 1982 authorization of Super NOWs. Examination of excess returns around the announcement date suggests that the announcement of the Super NOWs had a statistically significant (and negative) effect and that the impact differed significantly by type of bank. While returns for money center banks were generally unaffected, excess returns for regional retail banks were highly significant.     

THE GRAMM‐LEACH‐BLILEY ACT OF 1999: RISK IMPLICATIONS FOR THE FINANCIAL SERVICES INDUSTRY

We document significant risk changes in the financial services industry following the passage of the Gramm‐Leach‐Bliley Act of 1999. Banks experience an increase in risk regardless of whether they have taken steps to participate actively in the investment banking business. Insurance companies also experience an increase in risk, whereas securities firms experience a decrease in risk. We attribute the increase in risk for banks and insurance companies to the fact that the securities business is relatively more risky, and the decline in risk for securities firms to the fact that they can now diversify into relatively less risky banking and insurance businesses.