Deposit Insurance, Bank Ownership and Depositor Behavior
48 Pages Posted: 15 Jan 2021 Last revised: 10 Aug 2021
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Deposit Insurance, Bank Ownership and Depositor Behavior
Deposit Insurance, Bank Ownership and Depositor Behavior
Date Written: 2020
Abstract
We employ proprietary data from a large bank to analyze how – in times of crisis – depositors react to a bank nationalization, re-privatization and an accompanying increase in deposit insurance. Nationalization slows depositors fleeing the bank, provided they have sufficient trust in the national government, while the increase in deposit insurance spurs depositors below the new 100K limit to deposit more. Prior to nationalization, depositors bunch just below the then-prevailing 20K limit. But they abandon bunching entirely during state-ownership, to return to bunching below the new 100K limit after re-privatization. Especially depositors with low switching costs are moving money around.
Keywords: deposit insurance; coverage limit; bank nationalization; depositor heterogeneity
JEL Classification: G21, G28, H13, N23
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation