Lobbying on Regulatory Enforcement Actions: Evidence from Banking

Abstract

This paper analyzes the relationship between bank lobbying and supervisory decisions of regulators, and documents its moral hazard implications. Exploiting bank-level information on the universe of commercial and savings banks in the United States, I find that regulators are less likely to initiate enforcement actions against lobbying banks. In addition, I show that lobbying banks are riskier and reliably underperform their non-lobbying peers. Overall, these results appear rather inconsistent with an information-based explanation of bank lobbying, but consistent with the theory of regulatory capture.