Western European Stakeholder Banks’ Loan Loss Accounting

Jari-Mikko Meriläinen ()
Additional contact information
Jari-Mikko Meriläinen: University of Vaasa

Journal of Financial Services Research, 2019, vol. 56, issue 2, No 4, 185-207

Abstract: Abstract This study examines loan loss provisions (LLPs) in Western European banks over the 2004–2015 period. In particular, this study examines the discretionary cyclical component of LLPs and the timeliness of loan loss provisioning. Moreover, this study investigates the cyclicality of impaired loans. Banks are divided into four groups according to bank ownership type. The groups are commercial banks, cooperative banks, private savings banks and publicly owned savings banks. We thus study the implications of bank ownership type on banks’ loan loss accounting. The regression results suggest that, in general, provisions have a component that is unexplained by discretionary factors and that decreases during economic expansions and increases during recessions. However, in cooperative banks, this component is significantly smaller, suggesting that they do not decrease provisions because of, for example, over-optimism. Furthermore, stakeholder banks allocate provisions for the near-future expected losses whereas commercial banks do not. Finally, the impaired loans of savings banks are less sensitive to changes in the business cycle than those of commercial banks and cooperative banks.

Keywords: Banks; Loan loss provisions; Bank ownership types; G21; M41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10693-017-0283-4 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:kap:jfsres:v:56:y:2019:i:2:d:10.1007_s10693-017-0283-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10693

DOI: 10.1007/s10693-017-0283-4

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Financial Services Research is currently edited by Haluk Unal

More articles in Journal of Financial Services Research from Springer, Western Finance Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().