Commercial bank financial policies and their impact on market-determined measures of risk / BEBR No.556

Includes bibliographical references (p. 20-21)."This paper investigates the relationship between certain accounting measures that purport to reflect a firm's risk and two market-based measures of risk. The firms examined are commercial banks and bank holding companies. Some commonly used ratios to indicate risk in banking are capital to total assets, loans to deposits, liquid assets to total assets, and loan losses to total loans. These and other measures are included in multiple regression equations using systematic risk (beta) and total risk (standard deviation of return) as dependent variables. Results indicate that the accounting measures do explain from 25% to 43% of the variation in the market-based risk measures for banks. Signs of the estimated coefficients are usually consistent with expectations, supporting the conventional views of the usefulness of these ratios in measuring the riskiness of a bank.