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Since 1990, federal bank supervisors have announced formal enforcement actions publicly. The change in regime provides a natural laboratory to test two propositions: (1) claims by economists that putting confidential supervisory information in the public domain will enhance market discipline and (2) claims by bank supervisors that releasing such data will spark runs. To evaluate these propositions, we measure depositor reaction to 87 Federal Reserve announcements of enforcement actions. We compare deposit growth rates and yield spreads before and after the announcements at the sample banks and a control group of peer banks. The data show no evidence of unusual deposit withdrawals or spread increases at the sample banks following the announcements of formal actions. These results suggest that public announcements of enforcement actions did not spark bank runs or enhance depositor discipline. Apparently, depositors did not care a great deal about our sample actions.

As is well known, underpriced deposit insurance creates incentives for bankers to take excessive risk. Bankers can pursue high-risk ventures, confident of capturing the profits and shifting the losses, should failure occur, to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). Broadly speaking, two forces constrain this temptation: government supervision (Flannery, 1982) and discipline by bank claim-holders [see Flannery (1998) for a thorough review of the literature]. Theory and evidence suggest that discipline by bank claim-holders can constrain bank risk, in some cases better than bank supervisors. Bank claim-holders, with their own money on the line, have powerful incentives to monitor and punish excessive risk. Between 1987 and 1991, for example, holders of large certificates of deposit at thrift institutions responded to increases in the probability of failure by demanding higher yields and withdrawing funds (Park & Peristiani, 1998). Thrift supervisors, in contrast, responded to emerging problems slowly, hoping that troubled institutions would grow out of their problems. This regulatory forbearance significantly increased the ultimate cost of the cleanup Kane 1989 and White 1991.

We examined depositor responses to public announcements of formal enforcement actions in the 1990s. The evidence suggests that subject banks did not suffer deposit runoffs or increases in deposit costs relative to their peers when news about the actions reached the public domain. Indeed, it is hard to escape the conclusion that depositors did not care about the sample actions. Our findings do not, however, imply that supervisors should discontinue the announcements. Rapidly improving banking conditions and a rapidly declining number of bank failures characterized our sample period. Depositors might find information about formal actions useful in a banking environment more like that of the 1980s. More importantly, depositors might find news about formal actions useful, irrespective of the condition of the banking sector, if the press releases contained more contextual information.