Depleting net worth of Russian banks: Changes in banks’ risk-taking and the interest rate policy of the Bank of Russia

Despite achieving success in the tight prudential regulation of the banking sector, the Bank of Russia (CB RF) continues to reveal new cases of negative net worth in banks. This paper investigates the influence of banks’ risk-taking and the interest rate policy of the CB RF on the depletion of net worth in Russian credit institutions during 2007—2017. The quartile regression approach is employed to examine the differences in net worth depletion of already failed banks; additionally, the Heckman selection approach is applied to analyze potential negative net worth that has not been revealed by the CB RF yet. The estimation results suggest that banks’ risk-taking matters: its increases are positively associated with the rises of the probability of bank failures and the size of negative net worth, conditional on failure. Ignoring of banks’ risktaking leads to a substantial upward bias in the estimates of the total size of negative net worth in the banking system — from 3.6 to 5.3 trillion rubles, or by 2% of the system’s total assets. Further, the interest rate policy of the CB RF has a risk-shifting effect: an increase of the key rate together with a rise of its volatility are associated with a further depletion of banks’ net worth. Finally, the paper shows that a joint increase in banks’ risk-taking and the key rate has a further negative effect on banks’ net worth.