Identifying Financial Performance Drivers in the Indian Banking Sector During the COVID-19 Crisis

In order to shed light on the possible factors responsible for volatility in the financial performance of Indian banks, we primarily consider four novel variables in the study, including the COVID-19 crisis, NPLs, systemic risk, and government response. For this, we employ bank-level observations of 412 Indian commercial banks spanning 2018-2022. Using fixed-effects and 2SLS methods, we find that government response, COVID-19, and income diversification play a significant role in positively affecting the financial performance of Indian banks. However, non-performing loans, provisioning, systemic risk, and bank size are responsible for their poor performance. Projected macro-economic statistics suggest that the GDP growth rate and inflation have significantly increased the strength and resilience of Indian banks. The main evidence mainly supports the 'bad-management', 'too-big-too-fail', and 'diversification opportunity' hypotheses. The heterogeneity test and robustness check results are nearly identical to those reported in the main evidence. Overall, our findings reduce the concern of policymakers, though not completely eliminated, that tighter government regulation and provisioning for Indian banks may expedite the bank's ability to withstand their credit risk, systemic risk, and exogenous shocks, which can lead to a rapid improvement in their performance.