Academic literature on the topic 'Banking Behaviour'

This thesis consists of three essays on banking in the U.S. The first two chapters study how supervisors and regulators influence bank behavior. The third chapter explores how bank CEOs allocate credit. The first chapter uses a quasi-natural experiment, the closure of regulatory offices, to identify the effects of supervision on bank behavior. Under the decentralized structure of U.S. bank supervision, banks in the same geographic area may be supervised by different regulatory offices. The chapter shows that, following the closure of a regulatory office, banks previously supervised by that office increase their solvency risk and lending compared with banks in the same counties that are supervised by a different regulatory office. Further, these banks exhibit lower risk-adjusted returns, lower asset quality, and opportunistic provisioning behavior for loan losses. Information asymmetry between banks and supervisors partly explains the results. The second chapter documents that nearly 30% of U.S. banks employ at least one board member who currently or previously served on a regulator’s advisory council or on the board of a regulator as a form of public service. The chapter shows that connections to regulators undermine regulatory discipline by decreasing the sensitivity of bank risk to capital. Connected banks are able to extract larger public subsidies than non-connected banks by shifting risk to the financial safety-net, resulting in wealth transfers from taxpayers to shareholders of risk-shifting connected banks. One potential reason for these effects is that connected banks receive preferential treatment in supervision from regulators. The third chapter uses the birthplace of U.S. bank CEOs to investigate the effect of hometown favoritism on bank business policies. Exploiting within-bank variation in distances to a CEO’s hometown, the chapter shows that banks make more mortgage and small business lending as well as branch expansions in counties that are proximate to the hometown of the CEO. This is due to the CEO’s altruistic attachment to her hometown; the effects are stronger during economic downturns, among altruistic CEOs, in poorer counties and marginal mortgage applicants. Further, hometown favoritism does not lead to worst bank performance. However, it is associated with positive economic outcomes in counties exposed to greater favoritism.

In this thesis I combine VAR forecasting methods with the Campbell-Shiller log-linear approximation to the present-value formula for stock prices. Four aspects of UK stock market behaviour are studied. The first analysis involves decomposing the variance of the unexpected stock return into components due to news about dividends, news about future returns, and the covariance between the two. I find that changing expectations about future returns accounts for around four times as much of the variance of unexpected returns as news about dividends, with a negligible covariance term. My second study is a detailed analysis of the links between macroeconomic risks and required stock returns. Using 27 industry-based stock portfolios, I attempt to determine the effect that a number of macroeconomic and financial factors have on expectations of dividends, real interest rates and future required returns. The results go some way to explaining why some risk factors appear not to be significantly priced in financial markets, whilst others (particularly inflation) appear to induce counter-theoretical reactions in stock prices. Given an empirical proxy for equilibrium returns, the present-value model implies a set of non-linear restrictions on the parameters of a VAR, the latter being taken as a model of investors' expectations formation. In my third analysis, I test various models of equilibrium returns using aggregate UK data, and find some support for market efficiency. In particular, in accordance with the intertemporal CAPM, I find that the well-known ability of the dividend yield to forecast stock returns can be traced to the fact that the dividend yield Granger-causes the market return variance. In the final section I test two propositions: whether rejections of the CAPM at the aggregate level can be traced to rejections in specific sub-sectors of the market; and whether investors are more skilled at eliminating mis-pricing within market sub-sectors than in the market as a whole. I find mixed support for the CAPM at the disaggregated level. Furthermore, eliminating the covariance terms from the model for sector returns has little effect on the results, providing some support for the market segmentation hypothesis.

With the intense competition and increasing globalization in the financial markets, bank management must develop customer-oriented strategies in order to compete successfully in the competitive retail banking environment. The longer a bank can retain a customer, the greater revenue and cost savings from that customer. However, customers are also more prone to changing their banking behaviour when they can purchase nearly identical financial products provided by the retail banks. In order to stay competitive, bank managers need to understand the factors that influence and determine consumer’s bank switching behaviour. With China's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), their financial services market was liberalized and deregulated. As a result, customers have a greater choice between domestic and foreign banks. Furthermore, the emergence of the internet allows customers to access financial products without limitation, and increases the Chinese retail banks’ ability to prevent customers’ switching banks. This study identifies and analyses the factors that influence bank customers’ switching behaviour in the Chinese retail banking industry. The findings reveal that Price, Reputation, Service Quality, Effective Advertising, Involuntary Switching, Distance, and Switching Costs have an impact on customers’ bank switching behaviour. The results also reveal that the Young Age and High Income Groups are more likely to switch banks. In general, the results of this research allow service marketers and practitioners to develop and implement services marketing strategies to decrease customer defection rates, and in turn, increase bank profits. Furthermore, this research provides useful information for future researchers who study switching-behaviour in the banking industry.