How does the stock market value bank diversification in Thailand?

Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of bank diversification on stock market-based value and risk in Thai banking system. Particularly, this paper is focused on income diversification. More specifically, the influence of various kinds of diversification business on bank risk and value is analyzed in this paper, the effect of each components of non-interest shares on bank value and risk is examined. Additionally, alternative income diversity measure is computed and used for robustness tests. The results show that income diversification has a positive influence on a bank market value. The stock market investor anticipation is that there would be more benefits of income diversification for Thai banks. On the contrary, there is no evidence to indicate that bank risk is reduced when share of non-interest income increases. Therefore, proposing that Thai banks should increase their non-interest income as diversification strategy to gain more stock market values. Nonetheless, bank management teams or regulators should be prudent in deciding the strategies about changing or improving the policies or regulations associated with bank diversification or financial conglomerates especially for bank risk in the future.