اقدامات کلاس اوراق بهادار در بخش بانکداری آمریکا: حمایت از سرمایه گذار و ثبات بانکی

This paper investigates whether securities class actions (SCAs) can play a role in banking supervision, both as a warning signal of insolvency and as an instrument of market discipline to encourage bank managers to carefully evaluate risk. Two groups of US banks are compared over the 2000–2008 period. One includes banks that have faced at least one SCA, while the other is composed of non-targeted banks (control group). Results indicate that collective private litigation procedures are more frequently directed at financially fragile intermediaries exhibiting inadequate governance standards. Furthermore, banks which have been subjected to SCAs are likely to reduce their excessive risk positions. This supports the idea that SCAs could be efficiently employed as a complement to public supervisory activity in the banking sector.

Financial markets and the banking sector, in particular, are strongly regulated due to their public relevance. Integrity, transparency and stability1 of the financial industry rest on two pillars: ex ante regulation – such as deposit insurance schemes, capital and disclosure requirements – and ex post enforcement provided by government supervision authorities. Since the introduction of Basel II, however, increasing attention has been devoted to a third pillar concerning market discipline, 2 and several arguments are put forward its potential regulatory effects. The events connected to 2007–2008 crisis have then fueled the debate concerning the proper regulation of both financial markets and the banking industry. Although it is recognized that the recent breakdown has been a complex phenomenon generated by the interaction of several features, some authors assess that most of the losses have been due to negligence and insufficiently cautious management, which harmed both investors and the overall banking stability (Cukierman, in press and Zingales, 2008). Therefore, it is unquestionable that the ensuing complex financial turmoil could have been less costly if it had been managed by a more effective regulatory framework

In this paper we focus on the issue of whether SCAs can represent a complement to public regulation and supervision of the banking sector. Our hypothesis is that this instrument can play a role in banking supervision providing, on the one hand, a significant warning signal of instability (Red Flag hypothesis) and, on the other hand, acting as an effective incentive device for banks’ management to behave carefully (Safety Incentive hypothesis). We concentrate on US banks in the period 2000–2008. Measures of bank performance are related to the event of an SCA in order to understand both the mechanisms that drive the latter and whether the SCA event has a significant impact on risk undertaking and bank soundness. The problem of the endogenous nature of SCAs is managed by examining both the possibility that they are predetermined by past bank behavior and the possibility that they may influence bank behavior after the event