Banking, Disclosures, Bank loan portfolio compositions, Market reaction

We hypothesize and provide evidence that characteristics of banks’ loan securitizations accounted for as sales determine the extent to which banks retain the risks of the securitized loans. We show that banks retain more risk when: (1) the types of loans have higher and/or less externally verifiable credit risk, (2) the loans are closed-ended and banks retain larger contractual interests in the loans, and (3) the loans are closed-ended and banks retain types of contractual interests that more strongly concentrate the risk of the securitized loans. We show that the magnitude and type of retained contractual interests are not risk-relevant in revolving loan securitizations, because banks have more incentive and ability to provide implicit recourse, a non-contractual interest.

Prior research has found that loan loss provisions are positively associated with bank stock returns and future cash flows, conditional on less discretionary information about loan default. We find that these positive valuation implications obtain only for loan loss provisions for low regulatory capital banks in the fourth fiscal quarter. Our regulatory capital-based tests are motivated by the idea that increased discretionary loan loss provisions are plausibly good news only for banks which appear to have loan default risk problems based on prior information. Our fiscal quarter tests are motivated by findings in prior literature that suggest that managers have incentives to delay income decreasing accruals until the fourth quarter when the audit occurs, implying that income decreasing accruals are more likely, and therefore more expected, in the fourth quarter than in other fiscal quarters (Mendenhall and Nichols 1988; Boyd et al. 1994).