How did banks react to SVB collapse?

Abstract

This study is the first to comprehensively investigates the stock market repercussions of the SVB collapse for a sample of 528 individual bank stocks across 35 countries. Using event-study methodology, we find that the resilience of banks during the SVB collapse is intricately linked to their capital adequacy and liquidity. Specifically, banks exhibiting higher capital adequacy and greater liquidity mitigate losses during the SVB collapse, while controlling for bank-level and country-level variables. Further, we find that emerging markets banks exhibited significantly lower stock price declines upon announcement of the SVB failure than their counterparts in developed countries, indicating higher resilience to crisis for banks in emerging markets. This study offers a further understanding of the importance of capital adequacy and liquidity in shaping banks’ resilience to banking sector crises, such as the SVB collapse, and provides implications for policymakers seeking to enact policies designed to reduce bank vulnerability to external shocks.