Interest rate risk is one of the major financial risks faced by banks due to the very nature of the banking business. The most common approach in the literature has been to estimate the impact of interest rate risk on banks using a simple linear regression model. However, the relationship between interest rate changes and bank stock returns does not need to be exclusively linear. This article provides a comprehensive analysis of the interest rate exposure of the Spanish banking industry employing both parametric and non parametric estimation methods. Its main contribution is to use, for the first time in the context of banks' interest rate risk, a nonparametric regression technique that avoids the assumption of a specific functional form.
Linear and Nonlinear
ABSTRACTInterest rate risk is one of the major financial risks faced by banks due to the very nature of the banking business. The most common approach in the literature has been to estimate the impact of interest rate risk on banks using a simple linear regression model. However, the relationship between interest rate changes and bank stock returns does not need to be exclusively linear. This article provides a comprehensive analysis of the interest rate exposure of the Spanish banking industry employing both parametric and non parametric estimation methods. Its main contribution is to use, for the first time in the context of banks' interest rate risk, a nonparametric regression technique that avoids the assumption of a specific functional form. One the one hand, it is found that the Spanish banking sector exhibits a remarkable degree of interest rate exposure, although the impact of interest rate changes on bank stock returns has significantly declined following the introduction of the euro. Further, a pattern of positive exposure emerges during the post-euro period. On the other hand, the results corresponding to the nonparametric model support the expansion of the conventional linear model in an attempt to gain a greater insight into the actual degree of exposure.
J.E.L. Classification: G12, G21, C52Keywords: interest rate risk, banking firms, stocks, nonparametric regression techniques. Corresponding author. Departamento de Economía Financiera y Actuarial, Universidad de Valencia, Facultad de Economía, Avda. Tarongers, s/n, 46022 Valencia, Spain. Laura.Ballester@uv.es. Laura Ballester would like to express her gratitude for the funding received from the JCCM, proyecto PEII11-0031-6939. The authors would like to thank Alfonso Novales, Juan Nave, Ángeles Fernández, Paz Jordá, Miguel Ángel Martínez, Joaquín Maudos, and Eliseo Navarro for their valuable comments and suggestions. The authors are also grateful to the two anonymous referees for their comments that have contributed to improve this paper. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 6...