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As the U.S. economy becomes more consolidated, the strategic decisions of senior leaders at leading companies carry ever-greater weight. A lot is riding on how these companies are run, yet their day-to-day decision-making remains, in most cases, obscure.

But the banking industry is an exception. As , assistant professor of accounting at at 91����, notes, “Because the banking industry is heavily regulated, it allows us to have access to subsidiary banks’ financial information. We can observe how much money parent companies take from each subsidiary, as well as the internal capital allocation between subsidiaries by headquarters.”

Su’s forthcoming paper in Management Science finds that in multi-bank holding companies (MBHCs), especially those with multiple subsidiary banks or geographically dispersed operations, it’s essential to bridge the information gap between HQ and local subsidiaries. That is why corporate leaders strongly rely on internal accounting information, as a complement to financial performance, to help them make intramural investment decisions.

Su says that although recent rounds of deregulation and interstate banking consolidation have reduced MBHCs’ economic profile, studying their behavior is relevant “because they provide a clean empirical setting. With multiple legally distinct bank subsidiaries, we can directly observe how the parent allocates capital across units.”

“We often hear that bank holding companies should act as a ‘source of strength’ for subsidiaries. There is some truth to the ‘source of strength’ idea, but our paper also observes that holding companies don’t just allocate funds to save subsidiaries from failing. They’re also allocating funds for the better-performing ones, when the accounting reporting quality is good, to help them thrive.”

—Barbara Su, assistant professor of accounting at Costello College of Business

The paper was co-authored by Scott Liao of University of Toronto and Allison Nicoletti of University of Pennsylvania.

The researchers zeroed in on the subsidiary banks’ loan loss provision—an accounting adjustment reflecting anticipated loan defaults—as an especially meaningful indicator.

Their dataset included financial statement information from 3,031 bank subsidiaries affiliated with 799 bank holding companies, for the period 1996 to 2019.

Su’s hypothesis was that “the accuracy of the loan loss provision coming from the subsidiaries will, or should, guide the internal capital allocation at the holding company level.” In other words, HQ would be wise to interpret valid accounting information as a general quality index, helping them identify worthy targets for investment.

The evidence confirmed Su’s suspicions. The average accuracy of subsidiaries’ loan loss provisions was positively associated with HQ’s ability to pick winners, i.e., to invest in subsidiaries that would go on to achieve relatively high ROA or return on assets.

A follow-on study showed that this association was strongest for two subsets of holding companies: those more dependent on lending for their revenue, as well as those where HQ was most distant (either geographically or economically) from the local branches. Banks with troubled subsidiaries saw the weakest association between accounting information accuracy and wise internal investments. This amounts to further supporting evidence for the utility of loan loss provision as an in-house investment index for dispersed organizations, assuming the investment thesis has to do with picking winners rather than subsidizing struggling subsidiaries.

For Su, this research complicates commonly held beliefs about bank consolidation producing slow-moving behemoths getting by on sheer market power. “We often hear that bank holding companies should act as a ‘source of strength’ for subsidiaries,” she says. “There is some truth to the ‘source of strength’ idea, but our paper also observes that holding companies don’t just allocate funds to save subsidiaries from failing. They’re also allocating funds for the better-performing ones, when the accounting reporting quality is good, to help them thrive.”

Su also surmises that the decision-making method covered in her paper—HQ referencing internal accounting information as a gauge of quality—could apply outside banking. For example, it could come into play when evaluating subsidiary managers’ performance prior to a turnover decision. 

Nonetheless, Su recommends that leaders maintain a balanced informational environment. Internal accounting information should be used to augment, not replace, standard performance metrics such as ROA. “I guess we could roughly think about it in a two-by-two matrix,” she says. “The ideal scenario would be high ROA, with high information quality. You could also have high ROA and low information quality—that means you’re cooking your numbers.”