← Search

Journal of Financial Stability Vol. 28 2017

Does regulatory forbearance matter for bank stability? Evidence from creditors’ perspective

M. Mostak Ahamed1; Sushanta Mallick2,3

1 University of Sussex · 2 London School of Business and Management · 3 Queen Mary University of London

open access

Abstract

Regulatory forbearance in times of corporate distress has been a common practice in many countries to achieve bank stability, particularly so in the absence of a unified bankruptcy code, yet very little is known in the context of emerging market economies. Exploiting variation of membership across banks in a corporate debt restructuring programme (CDR) sponsored by the central bank in India, this paper finds that the banks that made use of regulatory forbearance (RF) on the restructured corporate loans could increase their stability significantly due to the extension of low provisioning on restructured loans. However, the positive effect of RF diminishes at higher levels of market power, highlighting that member banks with higher market power tend to originate riskier assets (as reflected in their risk-weighted assets) under the auspices of this programme. Our results remain robust to different estimators (including propensity score matching), ownership structure, and alternative measures of bank stability.

DOI
10.1016/j.jfs.2017.01.001
Volume
28
Pages
163-180
Language
en
Sources
bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

Cite