Regional economic conditions and aggregate bank performance

The idea that a bank's overall performance is influenced by the regional economy in which it operates is intuitive and broadly consistent with historical bank performance. Yet, micro-level research on the topic has borne mixed results, failing to find a consistent link between various measures of bank performance and regional economic variables. This chapter attempts to reconcile the intuition with the micro-level data by aggregating bank performance, as measured by nonperforming loans, up to the state level. This level of aggregation reduces the influence of idiosyncratic bank effects sufficiently so as to examine more clearly the influence of state-level economic variables. We show that regional variables, such as employment growth and changes in real estate prices, are not particularly useful for predicting changes in bank performance, but that coincident indicators developed to track a state's gross output are quite useful. We find that these coincident indicators have a statistically significant and economically important influence on state-level, aggregate bank performance. In addition, the coincident indicators potentially contribute to the out-of-sample forecasts of the relative riskiness of state-level bank portfolios, which should be of interest to bankers and bank supervisors.