Securitization and Market Power – Evidence from European Banks

Employing a unique hand-collected sample of 881 securitization transactions issued by 59 stock-listed banks across the EU-13 plus Switzerland over the period from 1997 to 2010, this paper empirically investigates if and how market power in the loan and deposit market may influence European banks’ incentives to engage in securitization activities. We construct product-specific residual Lerner Indices to measure market power in the loan and deposit market separately. Our results suggest that banks with higher loan and deposit market power securitize less, consistent with a reduced need for risk transfer and a reduced reliance on market-based funding. Various sensitivity analyses further show that these relationships vary across underlyings, issuance frequencies, and different time stages of securitization in Europe. Our findings contribute to the literature by disentangling loan and deposit market power as two further distinct determinants of securitization and thus, offer important insights regarding the ongoing policy debates on the consolidation of European banking markets and the revitalisation of the European securitization market.