U.S. banks have increasingly diversified into activities traditionally considered as non-core for the banking sector. This paper investigates whether diversification influences banks' investment (credit) policy and profitability. Diversified banks appear to benefit from “coinsurance,” supply...

The largest commercial bank stocks, ranked by the total size of the balance sheet, have significantly lower risk-adjusted returns than small- and medium-sized bank stocks, even though large banks are significantly more levered. We uncover a size factor in the component of bank returns that is...

The largest commercial bank stocks, ranked by total size of the balance sheet, have significantly lower risk-adjusted returns than small- and medium-sized bank stocks, even though large banks are significantly more levered. We uncover a size factor in the component of bank returns that is...

Higher bank credit growth implies that excess returns of bank stocks over the next one year are lower by nearly 3%. Credit growth tracks bank stock returns over the business cycle and explains nearly 14% of the variation in bank stock returns over a 1-year horizon. I argue that the predictive...

Current measures of bank distress find marginal value in predictive variables beyond a capital adequacy ratio and tend to miss extreme events impacting the entire sector. Our paper advocates a new proxy for bank distress: sentiment measures from banks' annual reports. After controlling for...

The organization structure of global banks affects how they respond to liquidity shocks and matters for international shock transmission. Liquidity shocks to global banks induces a fire sales of securities by their international branches that rely on parent banks for funding, but not by their...

Amit Goyal wrote a comment on our paper (Gandhi and Lustig (2014)) which misrepresents our study of the size effects in bank stock returns. This note shows that the size anomalies in bank stock returns documented by Gandhi and Lustig are robust to experimental design and are mostly driven by the...

This note presents the details regarding the definition of commercial banks in Gandhi and Lustig (2014). We also explore some alternative methods for identifying commercial banks in CRSP. Finally, we check if alternative definitions of commercial banks in CRSP affect the quantitative results in...

The largest commercial bank stocks, ranked by total size of the balance sheet, have significantly lower risk-adjusted returns than small- and medium-sized bank stocks, even though large banks are significantly more levered. We uncover a size factor in the component of bank returns that is...