In the Shadow of Banks: Wealth Management Products and Issuing Banks’ Risks in China

Viral Acharya, Jun Qian, Yang Su and Zhishu Yang

No 14957, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: We study the rise and risks in bank issuance of Wealth Management Products (WMPs), which are off-balance-sheet substitutes for deposits without the regulatory interest rate ceilings and constitute the largest shadow banking segment in China. We show that competition for deposits has a causal effect on the WMP issuance of small and medium sized banks (SMBs), where we instrument deposit competition by SMBs’ geographical exposure to the large (Big Four) banks. The Big Four banks substantially increased their loan supply to support the RMB 4 trillion stimulus initiated in response to the global financial crisis, and thereafter grew more aggressive in the deposit markets in order to stay below the regulatory ceiling on the loan-to-deposit ratio. In response, SMBs issued more WMPs and more frequently, besides also establishing fewer branches in cities with greater competition from the Big Four banks. We find that this growth of WMPs imposed rollover risks for all the bank issuers, as reflected in higher yields on new WMPs, higher borrowing rates in the inter-bank market, and adverse stock market performance of WMP-issuing banks on days with heightened rollover risks.

Keywords: Shadow banking; Regulatory arbitrage; Rollover risk; Financial fragility; Deposit competition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E4 G2 L2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban, nep-mac and nep-ore
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP14957 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:14957

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP14957

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().