The Determinants of Capital Structure: Some Evidence from Banks

Florian Heider and Reint Gropp

No 08-015, ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research

Abstract: This paper documents that standard cross-sectional determinants of firm leverage also apply to the capital structure of large banks in the United States and Europe. We find a remarkable consistency in sign, significance and economic magnitude. Like non-financial firms, banks appear to have stable capital structures at levels that are specific to each individual bank. The results suggest that capital requirements may only be of second-order importance for banks? capital structures and confirm the robustness of current corporate finance findings in a holdout sample of banks.

Keywords: capital structure; corporate finance; leverage; bank capital; banking regulation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G21 G32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-acc, nep-ban, nep-bec, nep-cfn, nep-eec, nep-eff and nep-reg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/24709/1/dp08015.pdf (application/pdf)

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:zbw:zewdip:7224

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (econstor@zbw-workspace.eu).