We assess the effect of formal enforcement actions against banks for safety and soundness reasons on punished banks’ deposits, and then examine whether this effect is caused by demand-side or supply-side forces. To this end, we use hand-collected data on enforcement actions, and bank-quarter data on deposits and other bank characteristics from 2000 through 2014. Our results show that total deposits at punished banks decrease by 8.5% in the post-enforcement year, with uninsured deposits declining by 14.5% and insured deposits falling by 7.4%. We also find that the deposit decline is predominantly caused by demand-side forces, that is, by punished banks’ decision to curtail the asset side of their balance sheet.

We show that borrowing firms benefit substantially from important enforcement actions issued on U.S. banks for safety and soundness reasons. Using hand-collected data on such actions from the main three U.S. regulators and syndicated loan deals over the years 1997–2014, we find that enforcement actions decrease the total cost of borrowing by approximately 22 basis points (or $4.6 million interest for the average loan). We attribute our finding to a competition-reputation effect that works over and above the lower risk of punished banks post-enforcement and survives in a number of sensitivity tests. We also find that this effect persists for approximately four years post-enforcement.