银行如何建立股权资本？

N O .1 1 7 4D E C E M B E R2 0 2 5 Lily Gordon|Beverly Hirtle HowDo Banks Build Equity Capital?Lily GordonandBeverly HirtleFederal Reserve Bank of New York Staff Reports, no.1174December2025 Abstract We examine the evolution of equity capital in the U.S. banking industry over the past 35 years. Earningsare the major driver of increases in equity capital in the banking industry. While common stock issuanceis frequent, amounts issued are generally small and do not contribute meaningfully to equity capitalgrowth in most cases. Common stock dividends and repurchases are significant drains on equity capital. Itis not uncommon for banks to pay out more than they earn, driven both by capital planning motivations JEL classification:G21, G35, G28Keywords:bank capital, equity capital, bank payouts, dividends and repurchases 1Introduction Capital is fundamental to the health and safety of banks. Equity capital, in particular, is thefirst line of defense in absorbing losses that can threaten the viability of a banking institution.Without sufficient equity capital, banks can be overly exposed to the possibility of failure and the In this study, we examine the sources and uses of equity capital in the banking industry –how banks grow equity capital and how they deplete it. Equity capital – which in the bankingindustry is the sum of common stock and perpetual preferred stock – is an accounting-based meas-ure that incorporates the value of stock when issued plus accounting-based retained earnings and We use regulatory reports filed by bank holding companies – the FR Y-9C reports – to measure the key components of changes in banks’ equity capital over time.2These componentsinclude new issuance of common and preferred shares, which increase equity capital; dividendsand share repurchases, both of which decrease equity capital; and after-tax earnings, which caneither increase or decrease equity capital depending on whether earnings are positive or negative. The largest contributor to the evolution of equity capital is earnings, which equal 11 to 12percent of equity capital in a typical year. While new issuance of common or preferred stock issignificant in some years and for some individual banks, it generally contributes much less to Common stock dividends and common stock repurchases reduce equity capital in mean-ingful ways, representing drawdowns of 4.5 and 4.0 percent, respectively, in a typical year. For thebanking industry, common stock is by far the larger component of overall equity capital, repre-senting about 95 percent of the industry total on average during the sample period. Reflecting its A closer look at the individual-bank data reveals detail that is not observable from the ag-gregate industry results. In particular, nearly all banks pay dividends most of the time – dividendpayments were positive in more than 85 percent of bank-year observations in our sample. As doc- Common stock dividends and repurchases exceed earnings for more than 20 percent of thebank-years in the sample, representing a net drag on equity capital for those institutions in thoseyears. We document significant year-over-year persistence in such behavior, as banks whose pay-outs exceeded earnings in the prior year are more likely to exhibit the same behavior in the current A meaningful share of banking organizations both issue new common stock and conduct of new issuance. This pattern suggests that issuance is only infrequently used as a direct means ofincreasing equity capital, likely instead reflecting factors such as equity awards associated withemployee stock-based compensation (SBC). And indeed, we find that while overall common stockissuance is unrelated to a bank’s use of SBC, smaller issuance amounts are positively related to Previous work has examined a range of topics related to the evolution of equity capital inthe banking industry, though few have examined that subject directly. The largest body of relatedwork has focused on dividends and share repurchases. For instance, several papers have examinedthe historical behavior of payouts in the banking industry, often emphasizing the relative roles of Other papers examine bank payout behavior during periods of financial stress, such as theGFC (Acharya et al. 2022, Cziraki et al. 2024, Hirtle 2016) and the COVID-19 pandemic(Fringuellotti and Kroen 2024, Hirtle 2023, Marsh 2022). These papers document that while bankscontinued to pay dividends well into the GFC, they cut back on share repurchases early in thisperiod. Similarly, most banks continued to pay dividends during the pandemic, though regulators some papers suggesting that risk-shifting was the dominant motivation (Acharya et al. 2016,Acharya et al. 2022, Fringuellotti and Kroen 2024) and others finding less evidence of risk shifting A third related strand examines common equity issuance. Baron (2020) focuses specificallyon the banking industry, finding that net equity issuance – that is, equity issuance net o