This study examines the relationship between financial statement comparability and bank risk-taking. Our analysis of a sample of publicly listed U.S. banks over the 1994–2019 period shows that banks with more comparable financial statements are related to significantly less risk-taking. We also find that the negative relationship between comparability and risk-taking is more pronounced for firms with more severe moral hazard and agency problems. Our documented findings are robust across alternative measures of comparability and risk-taking and considering change analysis, after controlling for strength of corporate governance and using propensity score matching and two-stage least squares estimation to address endogeneity concerns. Our analysis also shows that the relationship between financial statement comparability and bank risk-taking is stronger for smaller banks than for larger banks. Overall, this study provides unique insights into the role of financial statement comparability in curbing risk-taking in the banking sector.

这项研究探讨了财务报表可比性与银行风险承担之间的关系。我们对1994-2019年间美国上市银行样本的分析表明，财务报表具有可比性的银行与冒险行为的减少显着相关。我们还发现，对于道德风险和代理问题更为严重的公司而言，可比性与冒险精神之间的负面关系更加明显。在控制了公司治理的实力并使用倾向得分匹配和两阶段最小二乘估计来解决内生性问题之后，我们的研究结果在可比性和风险承担的替代措施以及考虑变更分析的所有措施中均十分可靠。我们的分析还显示，与大型银行相比，小型银行的财务报表可比性与银行承担风险之间的关系更强。总体而言，这项研究提供了关于财务报表可比性在遏制银行业风险承担方面的独特见解。