Financial crisis and sectoral diversification of Argentine banks, 1999-2004 (original) (raw)
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Should Banks Be Diversified? Evidence from Individual Bank Loan Portfolios
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How functional and geographic diversification affect bank profitability during the crisis
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Using bank-level data on 491 Italian banks over the period 2006-2012, we investigate the impact of functional and geographic diversification on bank performance during 2008's financial and 2010's sovereign debt crises. Both scenarios negatively affect bank profitability while discordant effects emerge in case of the Z-Score analysis. Italian banks' risk stays unaffected by the 2008's episode, while the sovereign debt crisis increases such risk. Results differ for the sample of mutual and not-mutual banks being the different banking groups characterised by different size and business models. JEL classification codes: G20; G21
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The simple answer to both questions in the title of this paper: No. We concentrate on three key aspects of the banking system’s difficulties during the 2001–02 crisis. Two are related to bank behavior (increasing dollarization of the balance sheet and expanding exposure to the government), and the other is related to the degree by which banks were hurt by depositor preferences, specifically, the run on deposits during 2001. We find that there was substantial cross-bank variation, that is, not all banks behaved equally nor were hurt equally by the macroeconomic shocks they faced during the run-up to the crisis. Furthermore, using panel data estimation, we find that depositors were able to distinguish high-risk from low-risk banks, and that individual bank’s exposure to currency and government default risk depended on fundamentals and other bank-specific characteristics. Finally, our results have implications for the existence of market discipline in periods of stress, and for banking...
Income Diversification and Bank Performance During the Financial Crisis
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Advocates of diversifying bank income sources often argue that diversification improves the resilience of banks during periods of distress. To test this proposition, we analyze the impact of income diversification on the performance of Italian banks during the recent financial crisis. Using detailed data on the composition of bank income, we show that institutions that were diversified within narrow activity classes before the crisis experienced large declines in performance during the financial crisis. By contrast, diversification across broad activity classes, such as lending and capital market activities, did not cause performance losses during the crisis. Our results support limiting banks' ability to diversify within narrow business lines, while permitting banks to diversify across broader activity classes.
The effects of diversification on banks' expected returns
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In financial theory, the optimal allocation of assets and its relationship with profitability has been one of the main concerns; the question has always been if banks should focus or diversify their assets. In our case, we would like to answer this question focusing in diversification of the loan portfolio, presenting a theoretical model that considers the possible gains from diversification, while taking into account the effects of monitoring. Additionally, we present empirical evidence on this matter for the Colombian banking system. According to the model, we find that once the banks have chosen its optimal level of monitoring, expected return is always higher when the bank decides to focus. Additionally, the empirical results suggest that there are no possible gains form diversification in bank's cost and that, on average, the effects of focusing the loan portfolio reduces bank's return while showing positive effects of focusing on an specific sector.
Don't Put All Your Eggs in One Basket? Diversification and Specialization in Lending
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
Should lenders diversify, as suggested by the financial intermediation literature, or specialize, as suggested by the corporate finance literature? I model a financial institution's ("bank's") choice between these two strategies in a setting where bank failure is costly and loan monitoring adds value. All else equal, diversification across loan sectors helps most when loans have moderate exposure to sector downturns ("downside") and the bank's monitoring incentives are weak; when loans have low downside, diversification has little benefit, and when loans have sufficiently high downside, diversification may actually increase the bank's chance of failure. Also, it is likely that the bank's monitoring effectiveness is lower in new sectors; in this case, diversification lowers average returns on monitored loans, is less likely to improve monitoring incentives, and is more likely to increase the bank's chance of failure. Diversified banks may sometimes need more equity capital than specialized banks, and increased competition can make diversification either more or less attractive. These results motivate actual institutions' behavior and performance in a number of cases. Key implications for regulators are that an institution's credit risk depends on its monitoring incentives as much as on its diversification, and that diversification per se is no guarantee of reduced risk of failure.
Monetary Economics, 2001
We study empirically the effect of focus (specialization) versus diversification on the return and the risk of banks using data from 105 Italian banks over the period 1993–99. Specifically, we analyse the trade-offs between (loan portfolio) focus and diversification using a unique data set that is able to identify individual bank loan exposures to different industries, to different sectors and to different geographical regions. Our results are consistent with a theory that predicts a deterioration in bank monitoring quality at high levels of risk and a deterioration in bank monitoring quality upon lending expansion into newer or competitive industries. We find that industrial loan diversification reduces bank return while endogenously producing riskier loans for all banks in our sample; this effect being most powerful for high-risk banks. Sectoral loan diversification produces an inefficient risk–return trade-off only for high-risk banks. Geographical diversification on the other ha...