Does an increase in competition increase or decrease bank stability? I use a novel way to capture changes in banking competition by exploring how the exogenous state-specific process of banking deregulation gradually lowered entry barriers into urban banking markets. I find that the increase in market contestability significantly improves bank stability. This result is robust to the inclusion of additional fixed effects and other influences, such as mergers and acquisitions, or geographic expansion. Moreover, I find that greater competition reduces banks’ failure probability, share of non-performing loans and increases profitability. These findings suggest that competition increases stability, as it improves bank profitability and asset quality.

[This paper assesses the impact of the geographic diversification of bank holding company (BHC) assets across the United States on their market valuations. Using two new identification strategies based on the dynamic process of interstate bank deregulation, we find that exogenous increases in geographic diversity reduced BHC valuations. We also find that the geographic diversification of BHC assets increased insider lending and reduced loan quality. Taken together, these findings are consistent with theories predicting that geographic diversity intensifies agency problems.]

We construct a novel panel of insider ownership for roughly 600 U.S. bank holding companies from 2003 to 2014 to test whether ownership structure shaped recapitalizations around the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). Insider ownership shows no discrete shift around the GFC. Using a difference-in-differences design with BHC and time fixed effects, we find that, after Q3 2008, banks with higher pre-crisis insider stakes issued significantly less common equity than otherwise similar peers. This effect is more pronounced where insiders enjoy greater private benefits of control, as proxied by insider lending and earnings opacity—consistent with dilution reluctance as the mechanism. The findings hold in propensity score matched regressions and when employing instrumental variables for insider ownership. These results reveal that ownership structure affects banks’ equity issuances in crises, underscoring the importance of accounting for ownership structure in bank stress tests and capital-regulation frameworks.

We develop a new identification strategy to evaluate the impact of the geographic expansion of a bank holding company (BHC) across US metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) on BHC risk. For the average BHC, the instrumental variable results suggest that geographic expansion materially reduces risk. Geographic diversification does not affect loan quality. The results are consistent with arguments that geographic expansion lowers risk by reducing exposure to idiosyncratic local risks and inconsistent with arguments that expansion, on net, increases risk by reducing the ability of BHCs to monitor loans and manage risks.

This paper assesses the impact of the geographic diversification of bank holding company (BHC) assets across the United States on their market valuations. Using two new identification strategies based on the dynamic process of interstate bank deregulation, we find that exogenous increases in geographic diversity reduced BHC valuations. We also find that the geographic diversification of BHC assets increased insider lending and reduced loan quality. Taken together, these findings are consistent with theories predicting that geographic diversity intensifies agency problems.