We examine the roles of bank ownership and CEO political faction membership in facilitating or hindering the implementation of central bank policy in China. Specifically, we examine the response of China’s commercial banks to People’s Bank of China (PBC) guidelines intended to decrease mortgage lending and to slow down the rise in residential property prices. We find that both bank ownership and faction membership matter. Central government-owned banks whose CEOs are members of the specialist finance faction within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) respond most strongly to PBC guidance, whereas provincial or city government-owned banks whose CEOs are members of a generalist faction respond least strongly. The implementation of PBC policy has real effects: in those cities where central government-owned banks with specialist CEOs constitute a larger percentage of total bank branches, house prices grew more slowly, as did the number of residential real estate transactions and the number of new listings. Where in contrast provincial and city government-owned banks with generalist CEOs dominate, the number of transactions grew faster; the rate of house price appreciation and the number of listings were however unaffected. We conclude that China’s different levels of government and the CCP’s different factions enjoy some discretion in responding to PBC guidance and that they exploit the discretion they are afforded to vary the strength of their response.

Many studies report that government-owned banks under-perform the private banks but no studies examine the reasons of this stylized fact empirically in emerging countries during 1993~2007. This study fulfills this gap. For simplicity, the under-performance of government banks is referred to as the GOB effect. Two matching theories, Nearest-Neighbor Matching (Nearest) and Mahalanobis Metric Matching (Mahala), are adopted to seek matched banks sharing similar characteristic variables located in the same countries. We propose three hypotheses, strong policy role hypothesis, weak policy role hypothesis and no policy role hypothesis, which classifies government-owned banks as having strong, weak and no policy roles, to explain the above phenomenon. Regarding to why GOB effects are commonly observed in emerging countries, this study find that government-owned banks, after being mandated to merge with a distressed or non-distressed bank, suffer adverse performance, supporting strong and weak policy role hypothesis. On the contrary, this study also finds government-owned banks undertaking no policy role perform equally as private-owned banks on average, supporting no policy role hypothesis. Next, by supporting the above three hypotheses, we suggest that political considerations indeed depress government bank performance and the GOB effect in emerging countries are coming from the policy roles influence.