Does bank integration contribute to insolvencies and crises?
Journal of Financial Economic Policy
ISSN: 1757-6385
Article publication date: 21 April 2020
Issue publication date: 21 January 2021
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to construct a measure of integration among global banks and examine its impact on bank insolvencies and bank crises.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors apply principal component analysis to measure a bank’s degree of integration to the global banking market. Moreover, they test whether bank integration affects bank insolvency risk, in which they treat the equity of individual banks as a call option.
Findings
The authors find that the banking industry has become more globally integrated over the past two decades. At the individual bank level, results indicate that banks with higher integration levels have more assets, more nontraditional banking services and more interbank businesses. Overall, they find that a bank’s integration level is negatively associated with insolvency risk, which suggests that greater integration with global markets diversifies a bank’s risk. At the country level, banking systems with less integrated big banks, or more integrated smaller banks, are more stable and hence less likely to suffer a banking crisis.
Originality/value
The authors construct a novel measure of integration among global banks and examine its impact on bank insolvencies and bank crises.
Keywords
Citation
Sun, Y. and Ni, Y. (2021), "Does bank integration contribute to insolvencies and crises?", Journal of Financial Economic Policy, Vol. 13 No. 1, pp. 62-93. https://doi.org/10.1108/JFEP-01-2020-0020
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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