This paper studies the differences in the announcement effects of seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) of commercial banks and non-banks, and explores the influence of bank regulation and the financial crisis on such differences. We find that abnormal stock returns on SEO announcements for US commercial banks are significantly higher than those of non-banks, consistent with the hypothesis that bank regulations reduce the likelihood that bank SEOs signal overpriced equity. The propensity score matching-based difference-in-difference analysis indicates that the differences in stock returns between banks and non-banks decreased during the 2007–2009 financial crisis period and increased after the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act in 2010

Non-performing loans (NPLs) represent a major obstacle to the development of banking sector. One of the key objectives of the banking sector reforms in China has therefore been to reduce the high level of NPLs. To do so, Chinese regulatory authorities have injected significant capital into the banking system and scrutinized NPLs since 2003. This paper examines the impact of NPLs on bank behavior in China. Using a threshold panel regression model and a dataset covering 60 city commercial banks, 16 state-owned banks and joint-stock banks, and 11 rural commercial banks during 2006–2012, we test whether lending decisions of Chinese banks exhibit moral hazard. The results support the moral hazard hypothesis, suggesting that an increase in the NPLs ratio raises riskier lending, potentially causing further deterioration of the loan quality and financial system instability. Policy implications of findings are evaluated

Supranational resolution of insolvent banks does not necessarily improve welfare. Supranational regulators are more inclined to bail-out banks indebted towards international creditors because they take into account cross-border contagion. When banks’ creditors are more likely to be bailed out, market discipline decreases and risk-taking by indebted banks increases. Depending on the trade-off between giving the right incentives ex ante and limiting contagion ex post, both a national and a supranational resolution framework can be optimal. In particular, if market discipline is low under both national and supranational resolution mechanisms, supranational resolution improves welfare as it stimulates interbank trade

We study regulatory enforcement actions issued against US banks to show that both board monitoring and advising are effective in preventing misconduct by banks. While better monitoring by boards prevents all categories of misconduct, better advising prevents misconduct of a technical nature. Board monitoring increases the likelihood that misconduct is detected, increases the penalties imposed on the CEO, and alleviates shareholder wealth losses following the detection of misconduct by regulators. Our article offers novel insights on how to structure bank boards to prevent bank misconduct

Debt overhang and moral hazard predict that poorly capitalized banks have a lower likelihood to issue equity, while the presence of regulatory and market pressures posits an opposite theoretical prediction. By using an international sample of bank seasoned equity offerings (SEOs), we show that the likelihood of issuing SEOs is higher in poorly capitalized banks and that such banks prefer SEOs to alternative capitalization strategies. A series of tests exploring the variation of capital regulation and market discipline show that market mechanisms rather than capital regulation are the primary driver of the decision to issue by poorly capitalized banks

The global financial crisis underscored the importance of regulation and supervision to a well-functioning banking system that efficiently channels financial resources into investment. In this paper, we contribute to the ongoing policy debate by assessing whether compliance with international regulatory standards and protocols enhances bank operating efficiency. We focus specifically on the adoption of international capital standards and the Basel Core Principles for Effective Bank Supervision (BCP). The relationship between bank efficiency and regulatory compliance is investigated using the Simar and Wilson (2007. J. Econ. 136 (1), 31) double bootstrapping approach on an international sample of publicly listed banks. Our results indicate that overall BCP compliance, or indeed compliance with any of its individual chapters, has no association with bank efficiency

We investigate the role of CEO power and government monitoring on bank dividend policy for a sample of 109 European listed banks for the period 2005–2013. We employ three main proxies for CEO power: CEO ownership, CEO tenure, and unforced CEO turnover. We show that CEO power has a negative impact on dividend payout ratios and on performance, suggesting that entrenched CEOs do not have the incentive to increase payout ratios to discourage monitoring from minority shareholders. Stronger internal monitoring by board of directors, as proxied by larger ownership stakes of the board members, increases performance but decreases payout ratios. These findings are contrary to those from the entrenchment literature for non-financial firms. Government ownership and the presence of a government official on the board of directors of the bank, also reduces payout ratios, in line with the view that government is incentivized to favor the interest of bank creditors before the interest of minority shareholders. These results show that government regulators are mainly concerned about bank safety and this allows powerful CEOs to distribute low payouts at the expense of minority shareholders

In September 2008, the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs), Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, were placed into conservatorship. The GSEs' equity prices dropped considerably in response, and, as a result, many banks that held sizable amounts of the preferred stock of the two GSEs recognized substantial losses. Fifteen failures and two mergers resulted. We treat these losses as plausibly exogenous, unanticipated, supply-side shocks to bank lending, as they are likely unrelated to demand-side factors that could affect lending, and because GSE investments were considered to be safe by banks, regulators, and rating agencies. As a result, this event allows us to examine the relationship between community bank condition and lending during the global financial crisis. We find that, following the shock, loan growth at exposed banks was about 2 percentage points lower than other banks

We investigate why only some banks use regulatory arbitrage. We predict that banks wanting to be riskier than allowed by capital regulations (constrained banks) use regulatory arbitrage, while others do not. We find support for this hypothesis using trust-preferred securities issuance, a form of regulatory arbitrage available to almost all U.S. banks from 1996 to Dodd-Frank. We also find support for predictions that constrained banks are riskier, perform worse during the crisis, and use multiple forms of regulatory arbitrage. We show that neither too-big-to-fail incentives nor misaligned managerial incentives are first-order determinants of this type of regulatory arbitrage

This article discusses the optimal leverage ratio and capital requirements when asymmetric information exists between the bank and the regulator. We show that the optimal requirements take different forms in the short and long run. In either case, imposing the risk-weighted capital requirement without considering the incentives of the bank to misreport its risk profile is never optimal by itself. In the long run, the optimal requirements take the form of a leverage ratio requirement on top of the risk-weighted capital requirement. The add-on leverage ratio requirement, which serves as a compensation for the limited supervisory power of the regulators, should be set such that the risk-taking behavior of the bank is unchanged from the situation in which the regulator uses the risk-weighted capital requirement alone, and the misreporting incentive of the bank is eliminated by the add-on leverage ratio requirement