2-3 pp. As a result, the lending rate is also higher by
that magnitude (see dg_CarLoan). We may recall
here that the mortgage loans might be subsidized by
the government. That might be the reason for the
lower risk assessment in mortgages.
Interpreting actual ROE has a drawback of reverse
causality (endogeneity) that we did not control for.
The rates might be higher when the ROE target is
high. Same time high rates may imply high actual
ROE. To avoid such a discussion, we will look at the
planned ROE. Importantly, we find a statistically
significant negative sign for the lending rates. This
means the higher the target ROE is, the lower lending
rates the bank offers all else being equal. This is
exactly the illustration of the bank risk-taking
channel. The bank sets rates lower wishing to attract
more clients and expecting to thus earn more profit.
However, underpricing may result in extra losses and
most probably harm the profit targets.
As for the bank-specific features, we have several
quite robust findings. Foreign banks tend to
underprice risk by up to -7 pp. and offer lower loan
rates by 1-2 pp. That might be in part due to the use
of the parent company risk models. When latter are
calibrated in the developed economy, they might
yield over-optimistic risk estimates in the emerging
economy than they really are.
State-owned banks – at least in the reduced sample
– demonstrate higher risk evaluation and setting
higher rates than other banks by around 1-2 pp. This
may come from their more prudent or more
conservative credit policy when bank’s safety is a
higher priority than its earnings. However, the status
of a systemically important bank does not seem to
statistically significantly impact neither risk
assessment, nor the loan ultimate pricing.
Banks that applied for the IRB permission
systematically demonstrate higher risk-assessment by
1-2 pp. and set rates by 4-5 pp. higher. Such a
difference may come from banks using own default
statistics and thus being able to more correctly assess
the retail credit risk.
Private and listed banks demonstrate interesting,
though in part controversial trends. From one side,
they are likely to underprice the retail credit risk from
-1 to -5 pp. From another side, they tend to set lending
rates – on the opposite – higher by 4-12 pp.
To sum up, we find that Russian banks tend to
materially differently evaluate retail credit risk as
well as differently price retail loans. This echoes the
findings of the international prudential authority
(BCBS, 2013c), (BCBS, 2016) and the academic
researchers (Behn, et al., 2016). Some of the
differences may originate from the differences in
constraints applied to banks. For instance, IRB-banks
compute risk and risk-weights themselves to derive
the capital adequacy, whereas other banks are forced
to utilize predefined fixed risk-weights. Positive
coefficients for the IRB status imply that the
prudential predefined risk-weights might be more
optimistic as they under-assess the retail credit risk.
A sort of implication for a bank might be not to file
IRB application for a retail book as long as possible
to benefit from the lower prudential risk-weights and
CAR constraints.
4 CONCLUSIONS
Bank risk-taking is an important research stream
within the Central Bank. People wish to investigate
how risk-taking changes in response to changes in the
monetary policy (Repullo, 2004), (Jimenez, et al.,
2014).
The natural demonstration of the bank risk-taking
behaviour is how it assesses risks and how it sets the
lending rates afterwards. Earlier studies demonstrated
that banks tend to materially differ in risk-assessment
for the very same borrower (actual or hypothetical
ones) (BCBS, 2013c), (Behn, et al., 2016).
In this paper we wished to screen Russian banks
to verify whether they are different to their European
counterparts from the above studies. Generally, we
find out that Russian banks are not much different as
they also produce different risk estimates and offer
different lending rates after controlling for the
funding costs and the bank risk-appetite proxied by
actual and planned ROE values.
Our research is unique in several aspects. First, it
uses unique, though not extensive dataset on the loan
offered rated for the same person since late 2020.
Second, we are the first to identify the differences in
the risk perception by the Russian banks. Third, we
found that most probably Russian banks decided to
faster uplift the lending rates and their risk assessment
after the key rate increase in April 2021, rather than
to proportionately increase the deposit rates. Fourth,
we uniquely study the specifics in the IRB-banks
behaviour in Russia. To the best of our knowledge, no
one considered IRB as a separate differentiating
factor of Russian banks. The fair excuse is that most
researchers before focused on data prior to 2018 when
the first Russian banks launched IRB for CAR
computation. Fifth, we seem to have found not only
the determinants of the differences in risk-
perceptions, but have concrete policy implications.
We see that foreign banks and private banks tend to
underassess the retail risk compared to the state and