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Review of Finance Vol. 20 No. 6 2016

Banking and Trading

Arnoud W. A. Boot1; Lev Ratnovski2

1 1University of Amsterdam and CEPR and · 2 2International Monetary Fund

open access

Abstract

We study the interaction between relationship banking and short-term arm’s length activities of banks, called trading. We show that a bank can use the franchise value of its relationships to expand the scale of trading, but may allocate too much capital to trading ex post, compromising its ability to build relationships ex ante. This effect is reinforced when trading is used for risk shifting. Overall, combining relationship banking and trading offers benefits under small-scale trading, but distortions may dominate when trading is unbridled. This suggests that trading by banks, while benign historically, might be distortive with deeper financial markets.

DOI
10.1093/rof/rfv069
Volume
20
Issue
6
Pages
2219-2246
Language
en
Sources
bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

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