Strategic scope and bank performance
Anthony Saunders,
Markus Schmid and
Ingo Walter
Journal of Financial Stability, 2020, vol. 46, issue C
Abstract:
One of the most dramatic trends in banking since the 1980s has been the secular movement away from core banking and interest generating activities towards enhanced reliance on non-interest-generating activities that focus largely on fees and trading profits. In this paper, we draw on a dataset covering nearly a million quarterly observations on more than 12,000 US banks and find no evidence that this shift in the bank business model harms bank profitability. To the contrary, a higher share of non-traditional bank income is associated with a higher profitability. The increase in profitability does not seem to come at the cost of substantially larger bank-level risk taking, at least not for large banks, which are the banks mostly involved in non-traditional bank business. There is also no conclusive evidence that a larger share of non-traditional income is associated with a larger contribution to systemic risk. The net benefits of non-traditional income increased in the 2000s, when both interest rates and bank margins started to decline. Estimation techniques that mitigate endogeneity concerns resulting from unobserved heterogeneity also show larger net benefits associated with greater bank reliance on generating non-traditional income.
Keywords: Core-banking activity; Non-traditional income; Bank size; Financial crises; Systemic risk (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G01 G21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1572308919306667
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
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:eee:finsta:v:46:y:2020:i:c:s1572308919306667
DOI: 10.1016/j.jfs.2019.100715
Access Statistics for this article
Journal of Financial Stability is currently edited by I. Hasan, W. C. Hunter and G. G. Kaufman
More articles in Journal of Financial Stability from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().