Market Discipline in Depositors’ Behavior and the Role of Risk-Rating Agencies: The Case of Chile

Abstract

This study re-examines the evidence of market discipline in depositors’ behavior in the Chilean banking system, and analyzes the role of risk-rating agencies in complementing the information available to the market for evaluating bank solvency in Chile. With that in mind, we use data on deposits by size and institutional sector, effective interest rates on time deposits, a set of indicators that reflect the solvency of banks, and the risk rates of bank-issued fixed-income securities. Our results for Chile show that the empirical evidence about market discipline tends to be stronger and more robust when measured by the interest rate, as opposed to the rate of growth of time deposits. Our empirical assessment regarding the role of risk-rating agencies in disseminating relevant information that promotes market discipline is inconclusive. On the one hand, we find some evidence in favor of the hypothesis that the analytical contribution of these entities cannot be replaced by more direct indicators of bank solvency, which can be constructed with publically available information. On the other, we find other evidence that tend to weaken the previous hypothesis.