Depositor discipline and the bank's incentive to monitor

Purpose - The aim of this paper is to examine the question of the specialness of banks by addressing concerns raised in the recent studies and deriving policy implications for the future of banking. The specialness of banks has been well documented in the finance literature. More recent research, however, calls into question the special nature of banks. Design/methodology/approach - We use event study methodology to study 423 bank loan announcements from 1988 to 1996 and examine the returns relative to proxies for the bank's monitoring incentives and skill using ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions. Findings - Our results indicate borrower abnormal announcement returns are positively related to proxies for the bank's monitoring incentives and skill as measured by: the ratio of uninsured deposits to total loans; a risk-adjusted measure of recovered charge-offs; and the relative bank-to-borrower capital ratio. Research limitations/implications - The results reveal how the fragile nature of the bank's structure improves the bank's incentives to monitor borrowers. Practical implications - Our results can inform the current debates in the Fed and in Congress surrounding reapplying the Glass-Steagall Act and limiting the size of banks. Weshow that banks were special before the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and when fewer banks belonged to the too-big-to-fail category. This suggests that reregulating banks to re-establish their fragile nature will re-establish them as information-generating intermediaries instead of just transactional institutions. Originality/value - Our findings have not previously been documented but are broadly consistent with models developed by Calomiris and Kahn (1991) and especially Diamond and Rajan (2001).