تاثیر آزادسازی نرخ سپرده در هنگ کنگ بر ارزش بازار بانک های تجاری

This paper examines the effects of a series of events leading up to the deregulation of deposit interest rates in Hong Kong on the market value of banks. All the evidence suggests that banks earned rents from deposit interest rate rules (IRRs) and deregulation would lower these rents and hence bank market values. On average, the total abnormal return due to interest rates deregulation was around negative 4%. There is some evidence that large banks and banks with high deposit-to-asset ratio suffered a bigger drop in value, suggesting that these banks enjoyed a bigger subsidy under the IRRs.

The regulation of interest rates paid to bank depositors represents one form of government intervention in the financial market that may lead to misallocation of funds. In the last two decades, policy makers in countries with deposit rate regulations have started to relax those restrictions in order to limit or eliminate such distortions, from big countries like the US to small city-states like Hong Kong. The deregulation of deposit interest rates in the US has been studied extensively in the banking literature. For example, Dann and James (1982) found that stockholder-owned savings and loan associations (S&Ls) experienced statistically significant declines in equity market values at the announcement of the removal of rate ceilings on certain consumer certificate accounts and the introduction of short-term variable rate money market certificates, suggesting that S&Ls had earned economic rents from interest rate restrictions.

This paper examines the effects of a series of events leading up to the deregulation of deposit interest rates in Hong Kong on bank shareholders’ wealth. The deregulation of interest rates in Hong Kong took place in two stages spanning over six years that were separated by the return of Hong Kong to China. During the first stage, the unfolding developments provided a good opportunity to study how the market reacted to new information concerning interest rates deregulation. Although the end result in this stage was that only a small fraction of the total deposit base was freed from the IRRs, all the evidence suggests that banks earned rents under the IRRs and news about potential relaxation of the rules lowered bank values.