Bank management in bank decline: Bank mergers as a recovery recipe?

Abstract

The aim of this article is to present a model concerning bank management during the period of decline. Our focus is on bank mergers as a way out in from a crises situation. Generally, the explicit factor behind bank decline usually relates an economic downturn. However, the implicit, triggering factor behind bank decline relates to bank management. The available options for crisis bank management beside mergers are to cut costs, to increase income, to get more own capital, to manipulate bookkeeping data, to sell the bank, to buy banks or to declare failure. Based on 309 bank mergers during 1990 to 2013, we found that bank managers in many cases gradually lost their confidence concerning their capability of successfully running their banks, therefore choosing to merge.