Concentrating on Bailouts : Government Guarantees and Bank Asset Composition

This paper studies the link between government guarantees for banks and bank asset concentration. We show theoretically that these guarantees, when combined with high leverage, incentivize banks to further invest in asset classes they are already heavily exposed to: the risk-taking via asset concentration mechanism. We confirm this mechanism using U.S. panel data, exploiting exogenous changes in banks' political connections for variation in bailout expectations. At the bank level, we find that higher bailout probabilities are associated with higher portfolio concentration. At the bank-loan class level, we find that banks respond to an increase in their bailout expectations by further loading up on loan classes that already have a high weight in their portfolio