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In this paper we analyze the impact of government and private ownership of banks on corporate innovation. We find that firms with more financing from government-owned banks are less (more) likely to initiate (exit) innovation. Among the innovators, firms that finance more through private banks have more innovative output. These findings could be driven by the selection of lending relationships based on firms' preferences to innovate or, alternatively, by the crowding out of innovation due to the presence of government-owned banks. To differentiate between these two explanations, we use the timing of government-owned bank distress events over the electoral cycle as an instrument. We show a remarkable increase in innovation following an exogenous decrease in government ownership of banks. Moreover, the allocation of credit is more responsive to the financing needs of future innovators among private banks, shedding light on the mechanism. Overall our results suggest that government involvement in the allocation of credit crowds out private banking and comes at the cost of lower corporate innovation.

Using loan-level data from Germany, we investigate how the introduction of model-based capital regulation affected banks’ ability to absorb shocks. The objective of this regulation was to enhance financial stability by making capital requirements responsive to asset risk. Our evidence suggests that banks ‘optimized’ model-based regulation to lower their capital requirements. Banks systematically underreported risk, with underreporting being more pronounced for banks with higher gains from it. Moreover, large banks benefitted from the regulation at the expense of smaller banks. Overall, our results suggest that sophisticated rules may have undesired effects if strategic misbehavior is difficult to detect.

In this paper, we examine whether decentralized decision making results in more efficient economic outcomes. In the German savings bank sector, distress events can be resolved either by a decentralized county-level politician or by a centralized state-level association. We document that decisions taken by the politicians at the decentralized level are distorted by personal considerations. While the occurrence of distress is not related to the electoral cycle, the probability of local politicians injecting taxpayers’ money into a bank in distress is 30 percent lower in the year directly preceding an election. Using the timing of the distress event in the electoral cycle as an instrument for who bails out the distressed bank, we show that decentralized bailouts result in inferior economic outcomes. These bailed-out banks perform more poorly and provision credit less efficiently when compared with more central-ized bailouts. We also observe a significantly worse real sector performance of localities that have undergone decentralized bailouts. Overall, our results highlight the political economy of decentralization – local politicians derive private benefits from controlling the bank at the expense of citizens at large.