BANK GEOGRAPHIC DIVERSIFICATION, BANK COMPETITION, AND THEIR EFFECTS ON BORROWING FIRMS

Author

Cong Xia, Southern Illinois University CarbondaleFollow

Date of Award

8-1-2018

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

Business Administration

First Advisor

Deng, Saiying

Abstract

In chapter one, by exploiting the staggered interstate banking deregulation as exogenous shocks to bank geographic expansion, we examine the causal effect of geographic diversification on systemic risk using the gravity-deregulation approach developed in Goetz, Laeven, and Levine (2013, 2016). We find that bank geographic diversification leads to higher systemic risk measured by the change in conditional value at risk (ΔCoVaR) and financial integration (Logistic(R2)). Furthermore, we document asset similarity and bank inter-connectedness as two channels to explain the documented results. The impact of geographic diversification on systemic risk is more pronounced in BHCs located in states comoving less with the U.S. aggregate economy. In chapter two, by integrating the staggered interstate bank deregulation into a gravity model, we construct a time-varying bank-specific instrument for geographic diversification, and investigate how geographic expansion affects borrowing firms’ innovation. Our approach disentangles the effects of bank deregulation on geographic expansion from competition and isolates its direct impact on innovation via the lending channel. Bank geographic diversification boosts borrowing firms’ innovation input and output, enables firms to expand innovation scope beyond core business, and enhances the economic value of innovation. We find that relaxing debt covenants and alleviating borrowers’ financial constraints are two channels through which bank geographic diversification spurs innovation. In chapter three, we construct a novel bank-specific and time-varying measure of deregulation-induced bank competition following Jiang, Levine, and Lin (2016) and Goetz (2017), and investigate the causal effect of bank competition on borrowing firm’s accounting conservatism. We find that bank competition leads to an increase in firm accounting conservatism. Moreover, we find that bank competition intensifies lenders’ monitoring in that banks impose more strict and intensive covenants on bank loans, and bank monitoring reduces the probability of default of borrowing firms, and thereby result in more conservative reporting of borrowing firms. Our findings are robust to alternative accounting conservatism measure C-Score and potential multicollinearity issue.