Who Bears Interest Rate Risk?

We study the allocation of interest rate risk within the European banking sector using novel data. Banks’ exposure to interest rate risk is small on aggregate, but heterogeneous in the cross-section. Contrary to conventional wisdom, net worth is increasing in interest rates for approximately half of the institutions in our sample. Cross-sectional variation in banks’ exposures is driven by cross-country differences in loan-rate fixation conventions for mortgages. Banks use derivatives to partially hedge on-balance-sheet exposures. Residual exposures imply that changes in interest rates have redistributive effects within the banking sector.Received October 31, 2017; editorial decision August 30, 2018 by Editor Philip Strahan. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.