Capital, risk and profitability of WAEMU banks: Does bank ownership matter?

We investigate the simultaneous relationship among bank capital, risk and profitability, but also considering bank ownership and the emergence of Pan-African cross-border banks. We specify a simultaneous equation model and estimate it using hand-collected bank level data from all West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU) countries for 2000–2014. We split the countries into lower middle-income (LMICs) and low-income (LICs) according to the World Bank classification. We uncover evidence that the sensitivity of bank profitability to an increase in capital ratio seems to be somewhat higher in LMICs (+0.10) than in LICs (+0.05). Moreover, we find that bank capital positions tend to comove positively with the business cycle in LICs, mimicking a key postulate of Basel III. After differentiating between cross-border Pan-African banks and foreign banks from outside the continent, we find that the overall effect of bank ownership on risk depends on the origin of banks (French versus Pan-African). These findings are robust to alternative estimation techniques and the use of competing measures of risk and profitability.