New perspectives on bank risk in Malaysia

Abstract

Stable banks in individual ASEAN countries are essential to the economic stability of the ASEAN region as these countries move towards the goal of greater financial integration in the region. This study comprehensively explores bank risk in Malaysia as compared to the ASEAN region over an 18-year period which includes the Asian and Global Financial Crises. Metrics used include non-performing loans (NPLs), conditional distance to default (CDD which focuses on tail risk of asset volatility and is the authors own measure of bank default based on an extension to the Merton distance to default (DD) model) and a tail risk (TR) measure being the difference between DD and CDD asset volatility. DD is usually applied to corporate customers of banks but has been applied in the literature to banks themselves, which is the approach used for CDD in this study. Multiple regression analysis is undertaken to assess the impact of CDD on returns. The regression and default results are compared between small and large banks. Malaysian banks were found to have consistently lower risk than the ASEAN region, with smaller Malaysian banks exhibiting greater risk than larger banks during non-crisis periods, but to a lesser degree during crisis periods.