Several studies have analyzed discretionary accruals to address earnings-smoothing behaviors in the banking industry. We argue that the characteristic link between accruals and earnings may be nonlinear, since both the incentives to manipulate income and the practical way to do so depend partially on the relative size of earnings. Given a sample of 15,268 US banks over the period 1996–2011, the main results in this paper suggest that, depending on the size of earnings, bank managers tend to engage in earnings-decreasing strategies when earnings are negative (“big-bath”), use earnings-increasing strategies when earnings are positive, and use provisions as a smoothing device when earnings are positive and substantial (“cookie-jar” accounting). This evidence, which cannot be explained by the earnings-smoothing hypothesis, is consistent with the compensation theory. Neglecting nonlinear patterns in the econometric modeling of these accruals may lead to misleading conclusions regarding the characteristic strategies used in earnings management.

To date, an operational measure of systemic risk capturing nonlinear tail-comovements between system-wide and individual bank returns has not yet been developed. This paper proposes an extension of the CoVaR methodology in Adrian and Brunnermeier (2011) to capture the asymmetric response of the banking system to positive and negative shocks to the market-valued balance sheets of individual banks. Building on a comprehensive sample of U.S. banks in the period 1990–2010, the evidence in this paper shows that ignoring asymmetries that feature tail-interdependences may lead to a severe underestimation of systemic risk. On average, the relative impact on the system of a fall in individual market value is sevenfold that of an increase. Moreover, the downward bias in systemic-risk measuring from ignoring this asymmetric pattern increases with bank size. In particular, the conditional tail-comovement between the banking system and a bank that is losing market value belonging to the top size-sorted decile is nearly 5.5 times larger than the unconditional tail-comovement versus 3.3 times for banks in the bottom decile. The asymmetric model also produces much better fitting, with the restriction that gives rise to the standard symmetric model being rejected for most firms in the sample, particularly, in the segment of large-scale banks. This result is important from a regulatory and supervisory perspective, since the asymmetric generalization enhances the capacity to monitor systemic interdependences.

We use the CoVaR approach to identify the main factors behind systemic risk in a set of large international banks. We find that short-term wholesale funding is a key determinant in triggering systemic risk episodes. In contrast, we find weaker evidence that either size or leverage contributes to systemic risk within the class of large international banks. We also show that asymmetries based on the sign of bank returns play an important role in capturing the sensitivity of system-wide risk to individual bank returns. Since short-term wholesale funding emerges as the most relevant systemic factor, our results support the Basel Committee’s proposal to introduce a net stable funding ratio, penalizing excessive exposure to liquidity risk.