International audienceWe compare the performance and risk of a sample of 181 large banks from 15 European countries over the 1999-2004 period and evaluate the impact of alternative ownership models, together with the degree of ownership concentration, on their profitability, cost efficiency and risk. Three main results emerge. First, after controlling for bank characteristics, country and time effects, mutual banks and government-owned banks exhibit a lower profitability than privately owned banks, in spite of their lower costs. Second, public sector banks have poorer loan quality and higher insolvency risk than other types of banks while mutual banks have better loan quality and lower asset risk than both private and public sector banks. Finally, while ownership concentration does not significantly affect a bank's profitability, a higher ownership concentration is associated with better loan quality, lower asset risk and lower insolvency risk. These differences, along with differences in asset composition and funding mix, indicate a different financial intermediation model for the different ownership forms

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In this chapter, we summarize the main results of a recent empirical research concerning European banks. We first explore the main drivers of the differences in risk-weighted assets (RWAs) across a sample of fifty large European banking groups. We then assess the impact of RWA-based capital regulations on those banks’ asset allocations in 2008–14. We find that risk weights are affected by bank size, business models, and asset mix. We also find that the adoption of internal ratings-based (IRB) approaches is an important driver of RWAs and that national segmentations explain a significant (albeit decreasing) share of the variability in risk weights. As for the impact of internal ratings on banks’ asset allocation in 2008–14, we uncover that banks using IRB approaches more extensively have reduced more (or increased less) their corporate loan portfolio. This effect is somewhat stronger for banks located in Eurozone periphery countries during the 2010–12 sovereign crisis. We do not find evidence, however, of internal models producing a reallocation from corporate loans to government exposures, suggesting that other motives prevailed in driving banks towards sovereign bonds during the Eurozone sovereign crisis, including the so-called ‘financial repression’ channel.

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