IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/apc/wpaper/171.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

A Q-Theory Of Banks

Author

Listed:
  • Juliane Begenau

    (Stanford GSB and NBER and CEPR)

  • Saki Bigio

    (UCLA, Visiting Scholar SF Fed & NBER)

  • Jeremy Majerovitz

    (MIT)

  • Matias Vieyra

    (Bank of Canada)

Abstract

We document five facts about banks: (1) market and book leverage diverged during the 2008 crisis, (2) Tobin's Q predicts future profitability, (3) neither book nor market leverage appears constrained, (4) banks maintain a market leverage target that is reached slowly, (5) pre-crisis, leverage was predominantly adjusted by liquidating assets. After the crisis, the adjustment shifted towards retaining earnings. We present a Q-theory where leverage notions differ because book accounting is slow to acknowledge loan losses. We estimate the model and show that it reproduces the facts. We examine counterfactuals: different accounting rules produce a novel policy tradeoff.

Suggested Citation

  • Juliane Begenau & Saki Bigio & Jeremy Majerovitz & Matias Vieyra, 2020. "A Q-Theory Of Banks," Working Papers 171, Peruvian Economic Association.
    • Handle: RePEc:apc:wpaper:171
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://perueconomics.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/WP-171.pdf
    File Function: Application/pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Faria-e-Castro, Miguel & Paul, Pascal & Sánchez, Juan M., 2024. "Evergreening," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 153(C).
      • Miguel Faria-e-Castro & Pascal Paul & Juan M. Sanchez, 2021. "Evergreening," Working Papers 2021-012, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, revised Aug 2023.
      • Miguel Faria-e-Castro & Pascal Paul & Juan M. Sanchez, 2022. "Evergreening," Working Paper Series 2022-14, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
    2. Reiter, Michael & Zessner-Spitzenberg, Leopold, 2023. "Long-term bank lending and the transfer of aggregate risk," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 151(C).
    3. Kirstin Hubrich & Daniel F. Waggoner, 2022. "The transmission of financial shocks and leverage of financial institutions: An endogenous regime switching framework," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2022-034, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    4. Barbaro, Bianca & Tirelli, Patrizio, 2021. "Forbearance vs foreclosure in a general equilibrium model," Working Paper Series 2531, European Central Bank.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Banks; Tobin's Q; Delayed Accounting; Adjustment Costs;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G21 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Banks; Other Depository Institutions; Micro Finance Institutions; Mortgages
    • G32 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Financing Policy; Financial Risk and Risk Management; Capital and Ownership Structure; Value of Firms; Goodwill
    • G33 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Bankruptcy; Liquidation
    • E44 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates - - - Financial Markets and the Macroeconomy

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:apc:wpaper:171. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Nelson Ramírez-Rondán (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/peruvea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.