Bailouts in banking industry : Curse or salvation?

One of questions discussed in the light of current financial crisis is the problem bailouts in banking industry. This thesis contributes to this dispute by studying the relationship between the probability to be bailed out and the risk appetite of particular commercial bank. The aim of this paper is to analyze this relationship in both, theoretical and empirical way, which is still missing in current literature. We work with two hypotheses in this paper. The first one is that there is a positive relationship between the above mentioned variables while the second one suggests that large commercial banks tend to have higher risk appetite. Our first hypothesis is studied in both ways, while the second one is analyzed only in a theoretical way. In the theoretical part we derive the relationships between considered variables under the general equilibrium framework. In our model we work with an economy with four different agents (namely households, firms, commercial banks and central bank). These derived relationships are then analyzed empirically. We work with a panel data dataset considering the data about 500 commercial banks from 70 countries over the 2005-2008 period. The results of empirical analysis suggest that there is a negative relationship between the probability to be bailed out and the risk..