This paper examines the impact of political institutions on bank risk-taking behavior. Using an international sample of banks from 98 countries over the period 1998–2007, I document that sound political institutions stimulate higher bank risk-taking. This is consistent with the hypotheses that better political institutions increase banks’ risk by boosting the credit market competition from alternative sources of finance and generating the moral hazard problems due to the expectation of government bailouts in worst economic conditions. While it is contrary to the hypotheses that better political institutions decrease banks’ risk by lowering the government expropriation risk and the information asymmetries between banks and borrowers. The results are robust to a number of sensitivity tests, including alternative proxies of bank risk-taking and political institutions, cross-sectional bank- and country-level regressions, endogeneity concerns of political institutions, country income levels, explicit deposit insurance schemes and sample extension from 1998 to 2014. I also examine the interdependence between political and legal institutions and find that political and legal institutions complement each other to influence bank risk-taking behavior.

Using news-based government economic policy uncertainty (EPU) index of Baker et al. (2016) and bank-level data from 17 countries over the period 1998–2012, we find that government economic policy uncertainty has significant positive association with interest rates on bank gross loans. Specifically, a one standard deviation increase in EPU leads to 21.84 basis points increase in average interest rates on bank gross loans. We conjecture the economic policy uncertainty boosts banks’ loan prices by increasing the borrowers’ default risk. The impact of EPU on banks’ loan pricing remains persistent after controlling for banks’ own idiosyncratic default risk and the political risk variables from ICRG database. Results remain robust when we use general elections as an alternative proxy of government economic policy uncertainty. We also confirm main results with syndicated loan deals data and observe a significant positive association between loan spreads and EPU index. Together, our results suggest that government economic policy uncertainty is an economically important risk factor for banks’ loan pricing.