Abstract
Choosing appropriate peer groups for commercial banks is important to investors comparing bank performance, for regulators evaluating safety and soundness, for bank management looking at merger alternatives or relative performance, and for bank researchers testing hypotheses and making policy judgments about the banking system. We use commercial bank financial statements with common size variables as the inputs to a cluster analysis model to identify clusters or groups of banks with financial structures that are relatively homogeneous within groups and distinct across groups. Managerial strategies and idiosyncrasies, local and global economic conditions, and the regulatory environment shape bank financial statements, and financial statements should reflect the financial and operational differences across banks. Using year-end data from 2014, we cluster 6444 banks into several such groups. Our results show that bank clusters are formed largely around loan types, funding differences, and management’s strategic choices. We compare the ability of bank clusters and bank size to explain several widely used measures of bank performance and risk in additional years. These bank clusters are shown to have substantially greater explanatory power in regression models when compared to groupings based on bank size in several different years.
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Notes
We repeat our analysis for three additional years (2015, 2016, and 2017) as discussed in Section 3.2.
We use pre-tax earnings to mitigate the effect of S-corporation banks that do not pay taxes at the corporate level.
These include the pseudo F-statistic, the approximate expected overall R-square, and the cubic clustering criterion.
The conclusions drawn in Section 3.2 are not sensitive to forming a different number of clusters.
The naming of clusters is arbitrary. For convenience, we name the clusters based on their descending number of members. Cluster 1 is the cluster with the largest number of members and Cluster 25 the smallest.
We will generally ignore the small clusters in our analysis because their number of members is too small for hypothesis testing.
Centroid distances between all pairs of clusters are available upon request.
The variance-weighted R-square is greater because, on average, the variables with higher variances had higher R-squares.
Using an F-test, the hypothesis that the regression coefficients are equal to zero is rejected at low p-values for all regressions, even those with the lowest R-squares.
All unreported results are available upon request.
We use one fewer size group than Hughes and Mester (2013) because we combine their two largest groups ($50 billion to $100 billion and > $100 billion) into one group due to the small number of banks in those size groups. We repeat the analysis with the bank size categories of Berger and Bouwman (2013) and Black and Hazelwood (2013) and find results that are qualitatively the same. Additional results are available upon request.
We omit results for 2015 and 2016 for brevity. Conclusions are unchanged, and results are available upon request.
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Cyree, K.B., Davidson, T.R. & Stowe, J.D. Forming appropriate peer groups for bank research: a cluster analysis of bank financial statements. J Econ Finan 44, 211–237 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12197-019-09483-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12197-019-09483-7
Keywords
- Commercial bank taxonomy
- Financial institutions
- Cluster analysis
- Bank financial statements
- Bank peer groups