Competition and Bank Payout Policy

Abstract Leveraging branch‐level data on bank deposits, we provide evidence of a negative impact of branching restrictions on payout ratios, which occurs only for banks with a low charter value, as proxied by the market‐to‐book ratio. The results for the market‐to‐book ratio extend to the Lerner index, the return on assets, and the Z‐score, suggesting that risk‐shifting incentives drive our results rather than signaling incentives or agency costs. Our results are robust to different proxies for banking competition and identification strategies, and bootstrap simulations suggest that our results are not due to confounding factors.