Systemic Banking crises are a recurrent phenomenon that affects society, and there is a need for a better understanding of the risk factors to support prudential regulation and reduce unnecessary risk intake in the financial system. This paper examines the main bank risk determinants in Latin America. The period analysed covers the timespan from 1999 to 2013, including the systemic banking crisis episodes in Argentina (2001–2003) and Uruguay (2002–2005). We apply a new data-driven comparable methodology to classify and select commercial banks from the sample. We study bank risk proxied by the Z-score. We use the system-GMM estimator as our main empirical analysis method. According to our results, well capitalized, liquid, and traditional commercial banks are less risky. We perform robustness tests by applying OLS, and the results resemble our original model.

This article empirically analyzes the effects of revenue diversification on the profitability and risk of a large sample of Eurozone banks over the period from 2000 to 2012. We use the generalized method of moments (GMM) estimator, which is also referred to as the system-GMM estimator. We conclude that higher income diversification favors bank profitability. However, our study does not find a significant relationship between revenue diversification and bank risk, even when considering a crisis period. Our results suggest that establishing restrictions in the universal banking model could damage the resilience of the financial system, and thus affect the sustainability of the uneven economic recovery in Europe.

In this paper we use a dynamic panel data model to analyze bank-specific and macroeconomic determinants of bank risk for a large sample of commercial banks oper