How do leverage ratios affect bank share performance during financial crises: The Japanese experience of the late 1990s

•Leverage has a role in the cross-section of bank performance during a crisis.•Banks with more market leverage present worse performance during the crisis.•Banks with more market leverage were affected more adversely by systemic failures.•The results are robust across alternative model specifications and sample intervals.

This study investigates the relationship between leverage ratios and bank share performance for a sample of Japanese banks during the period of financial crisis in the late 1990s. We differentiate between two types of leverage ratios: book leverage and market leverage. We show that market leverage instead of book leverage observed before the crisis has statistically and economically significant predictive power for the cross-sectional variation in bank performance during the crisis, even after controlling for a variety of other indicators reflecting bank’s characteristics and financial conditions. We also find that banks with lower market leverage ratios were affected more adversely by the failure announcements of large financial institutions during the crisis. The results are robust across alternative model specifications, statistical methodologies, lengths of sample intervals, and measures of bank share performance during the crisis. Our results therefore have important implications for regulators in identifying distressed banks that are vulnerable to the deterioration in conditions of the financial system.