Who Bears Interest Rate Risk?∗
Who bears interest rate risk?∗ Peter Hoffmann† Sam Langfield‡ Federico Pierobon§ Guillaume Vuillemey¶ Abstract We study the allocation of interest rate risk within the European banking sector using novel data. Banks’ exposure to interest rate risk is small on aggregate, but heterogeneous in the cross-section. In contrast to conventional wisdom, net worth is increasing in interest rates for approximately half of the institutions in our sample. Cross-sectional variation in banks’ exposures is driven by cross-country differences in loan-rate fixation conventions for mortgages. Banks use derivatives to share interest rate risk and partially hedge on-balance sheet exposures. Residual exposures imply that changes in interest rates have redistributive effects within the banking sector. Keywords: Interest Rate Risk, Banking, Risk Management, Hedging JEL Classification: G21, E43, E44 ∗This version: July 25, 2018. First version: June 23, 2017. We thank Thorsten Beck, Markus Brun- nermeier, Stijn Claessens, Jean-Edouard Colliard, Filippo De Marco, Mark Flannery, Johan Hombert, Malcolm Kemp, Christoph Memmel, Christophe Pérignon, Amiyatosh Purnanandam, David Thesmar, Yannick Timmer, Skander Van den Heuvel and James Vickery for helpful comments and suggestions. We also thank conference participants at FIRS 2018 (Barcelona), the SFS Cavalcade North America 2018 (Yale), the XII Annual Seminar on Risk, Financial Stability and Banking at Banco Central do Brasil, as well as seminar participants at Banca d’Italia, Bank of England, Deutsche Bundesbank, European Cen- tral Bank, European Systemic Risk Board, and Reserve Bank of Australia. Jorge Abad and Christoph Aymanns provided excellent research assistance. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the institutions to which they are affiliated.
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