Moral hazard, agency problem and ownership structure

Abstract

Using a sample of recent Korean banking industry for 1994-2000, we examine how the effectiveness of managerial ownership is affected by the regulatory regimes in banking industry and the banks’ moral hazard incentives. We found that the managers of the banks in the higher moral-hazard group (the group of banks that are known to have greater moral hazard incentives in the literature such as the banks with lower charter value, greater asset size and lower equity capital) tend to have greater incentives to align their interests to those of stockholders by taking on more risk as managerial ownership rises, compared to the banks in the lower moral-hazard group, but only over the relatively deregulated period 1994-1997. Thus, in terms of only addressing the owner/manager agency problem, the owner/manager agency problem of banks can be easily addressed by changing their insider holdings or ownership structure, in particular when the banks have relatively higher moral-hazard incentives and banking regulations are loose. But we also found that this increased risk-taking has not ultimately resulted in better performance of the bank. This result may suggest a very important policy implication regarding the safety of the banking industry. If the increased risk-taking with greater managerial ownership does not contribute to improving the bank profitability, taking on more risk could end up with only increasing the possibility of failure of the bank. Therefore, the increase in insider holdings to address the owner/manager agency problem may have to be associated with closer and more frequent monitoring of the banks’ risk-taking behavior.