What Explains European Banks Risk-Taking? A Simultaneous Equations Approach

Abstract

The global financial crisis has led to an increasingly focused attention on excessive bank risk-taking. One of the consequences is that the role of internal governance mechanisms (such as the board of directors) in monitoring risk has come under greater scrutiny. In this paper we examine the impact of board structure, ownership structure, risk governance mechanisms and other bank-specific factors on bank risk-taking for a sample of 72 publicly listed European banks. Using a simultaneous equations approach, our main findings indicate that the proportion of independent directors, board size and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) power (or CEO authority) negatively affect bank risk-taking during the financial crisis. On the contrary, institutional shareholders positively influence bank risk-taking and both the existence of a risk committee and a Chief Risk Officer (CRO) who is a member of the board have no significant impact. The results remain unchanged when applying both three-stage least squares (3SLS) and the two-stage least squares (2SLS) estimation methods as well as when all variables are winsorised. Additionally, we extend our analysis for the period before the financial crisis (proxy for “stable” periods) to test whether the impact of governance mechanisms and other determinants of risk-taking depend on environmental conditions and we conclude that it is indeed sensitive to the economic context. In fact, we find that some of governance mechanisms are relevant in crisis conditions but not in non-crisis conditions and thus, their impact depends on macroeconomic conditions.