A comprehensive analysis of the decline in the market-to-book ratio of European banks
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We analyse a sample of 215 European banks and find that their market-to-book ratio has declined substantially since the GFC. To assess what may account for this, bank-specific and country-specific indicators are used, as well as, for the first time for European banks, ESG variables. We find bank fundamentals, such as ROE and volatility of stock returns to be important determinants of the market-to-book ratio. We also find the valuation of large banks to be penalized more, relative to that of smaller ones. On the country-specific front, we find GDP growth to be significant, as well as the relative size of the banking sector. As far as ESG is concerned, we find different ESG sub-pillars to affect bank valuation differently, more specifically, we find a positive relationship between duality and valuation, particularly for large banks, and a negative one for environmental engagement, the latter being suggestive of the ‘over-investment’ hypothesis. • The market-to-book ratio of European banks has been persistently declining since the Global Financial Crisis. • Return on equity and volatility of stock returns are important determinants of bank valuation, as per the standard theoretical dividend discount model. • The valuation of large banks has been penalized more, relative to that of smaller ones. • ESG sub-pillars affect bank valuation differently. • There are differences in the factors affecting large and smaller bank valuations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".