Bank consolidation is a global phenomenon that may enhance stakeholders' value if managers do not sacrifice value to build empires. We find strong evidence of managerial entrenchment at U.S. bank holding companies that have higher levels of managerial ownership, better growth opportunities, poorer financial performance, and smaller asset size. At banks without entrenched management, both asset acquisitions and sales are associated with improved performance. At banks with entrenched management, sales are related to smaller improvements while acquisitions are associated with worse performance. Consistent with scale economies, an increase in assets by internal growth is associated with better performance at most banks.
Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in AbstractBank consolidation is a global phenomenon. It may enhance the value of firms in the industry if, for example, it is driven by scale and scope economies, but skeptics often accuse bankers of sacrificing value to build empires. Using data on bank holding companies in the U.S., we find strong evidence of managerial entrenchment that influences how asset acquisitions and sales affect financial performance. We measure a bank's financial performance both by Tobin's q ratio and by the bank's failure to achieve its highest potential market value, which we estimate using a stochastic frontier technique.We find evidence of entrenchment at banks with higher levels of managerial ownership, better growth opportunities, poorer financial performance, and smaller asset size. However, when managers are faced with better growth opportunities, they generally appear to have an elastic demand for agency goods (perquisites, shirking, risk avoidance, etc.). With regard to empire building, we find that an increase in asset size achieved by internal growth is associated with better performance at most banks, but an increase in acquired assets is associated with worse performance at banks with entrenched managers. In contrast, a larger amount of sold assets by banks with entrenched management is related to improved performance. We do not obtain this asymmetry between the effect of sales and acquisitions at banks not exhibiting entrenchment: larger sales and larger acquisitions both improve performance, a result predicted by Shleifer and Vishny (1989).Our evidence is consistent with the often cited role of scale economies as a driver of bank consolidation, but it also suggests that the benefits of asset acquisitions are not obtained by entrenched managers, who may be able to resist market discipline to build empires.Correspondence to Joseph P. Hughes,
Commercial banks leverage their equity capital with demandable debt that participates in the economy's payments system. The distinctive nature of this debt generates an unusual degree of liquidity risk that can, at times, threaten the payments system. To reduce this threat, insurance protects deposits; and to reduce the moral hazard problems of the debt contract and deposit insurance, bank regulation constrains risk-taking and defines standards of capital adequacy. The inherent liquidity risk of demandable debt as well as potential regulatory penalties for poor financial performance creates the potential for costly episodes of financial distress that affects banks' employment of capital. The existence of financial-distress costs implies that many banks are likely to take actions, such as holding additional capital, that increase bank safety at the expense of shortrun returns. While such a strategy may reduce average returns in the short run, it may maximize the market value of the bank by protecting charter value and protecting against regulatory interventions. On the other hand, some banks whose charter values are low may have an incentive to follow a higher risk strategy, one that increases average return at the expense of greater risk of financial distress and regulatory intervention. This paper examines how banks' employment of capital in their production plans affects their "market value" efficiency. We develop a market-based measure of production efficiency and implement it on a sample of publicly traded bank holding companies. Our evidence indicates that banks' efficiency and, hence, the market value of their assets are influenced by the level and allocation of capital. However, even controlling for the effect of size, we find that the influence of equity capital differs markedly between banks with higher capital-to-assets ratios and those with lower ratios. For inefficient banks with higher capital-to-assets ratios, marginal increases in capitalization and asset quality boost their market-value efficiency. For inefficient banks with lower levels of capitalization, the signs of these effects are reversed. Controlling for asset size, it appears that less capitalized banks cannot afford to mimic the investment strategy of more capitalized banks, which may be using this greater capitalization to signal their safety to financial markets. 1 See Bhattacharya and Thakor (1993) for a review of the extensive literature on banking theory. 2 See Jensen and Meckling (1976) for a discussion of the debt contract's moral hazard problem.
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