During the global financial crisis, a large number of banks worldwide either failed or received financial aid thus inflicting substantial losses on the system. We contribute to the early warning literature by constructing a dynamic competing risks hazard model that explores the joint determination of the probability of a distressed bank to face a licence withdrawal or to be bailed out. The underlying patterns of distress are analysed based on a broad range of bank-level and environmental factors. We find that institutions with inadequate capital, illiquid and risky assets, poor management, low levels of earnings and high sensitivity to market conditions have a higher probability to go bankrupt. Bailed out banks, on the other hand, face both capital and liquidity shortages, experience low earnings, and are highly exposed to market products; however, neither the managerial expertise, nor the quality of assets is relevant to the odds of bailout. We further document that large and complex banks are less likely to fail and more likely to be bailed out and also that authorities are more prone to provide support to a distressed bank, which is well-connected with politicians and political parties and less prone to let it go bankrupt. Importantly, our model outperforms the commonly used logit model in terms of forecasting power in all the in- and out-of-sample tests we conduct.

Extensive regulatory changes and technological advances have transformed banking systems to a great extent. Banks have reacted to the challenges posed by the new operating environment by creating new products and expanding their activities to some uncharted business areas. In this paper, we study how modern banking which gave birth to the off-balance-sheet leverage activities affected the risk profile of U.S. banks as well as the level of systemic risk before and after the onset of the late 2000s financial crisis. Towards this, we separate on- from off-balance-sheet leverage and capture the latter with different, yet complementary, measures which do not exist in the current literature. Special attention is paid on the deleveraging process that occurred in the banking market after the crisis erupted, which is an additional innovative feature of this study. Our findings reveal that leverage, both explicit and hidden off-the-balance-sheet, increases the individual risk of banking firms making them vulnerable to financial shocks. Reverse leverage, on the other hand, is beneficial for individual banks’ health, but is found to be harmful for financial stability. We also demonstrate that the banks which concentrate on traditional lines of business typically carry less risk compared to those involved with modern financial instruments.

The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between banking sector reform and bank performance – measured in terms of efficiency, total factor productivity growth and net interest margin – accounting for the effects through competition and bank risk-taking. To this end, we develop an empirical model of bank performance, which is consistently estimated using recent econometric techniques. The model is applied to bank panel data from ten newly acceded EU countries. The results indicate that both banking sector reform and competition exert a positive impact on bank efficiency, while the effect of reform on total factor productivity growth is significant only toward the end of the reform process. Finally, the effect of capital and credit risk on bank performance is in most cases negative, while it seems that higher liquid assets reduce the efficiency and productivity of banks.