The paper is organised as follows. Section 2 describes our sample and explains how we address the survivorship bias in the Bankscope database. Section 3 presents the baseline corporate finance style regressions for our sample of large banks and bank holding companies. Section 4 decomposes banks’ liabilities into deposit and non-deposit liabilities. Section 5 examines the permanent and transitory components of banks’ leverage. Section 6 analyzes the effect of deposit insurance on banks’ capital structures, including the role of deposit insurance coverage in defining banks’ leverage targets. The section also considers Tier 1 capital and banks that are.
