A popular approach to measuring the interest-rate risk exposure of a bank is to run regressions of the bank’s stock return on a risk factor, such as an interest rate. The regression coefficient on the interest rate — often referred to as the interest-rate beta, is a measure of the bank’s average exposure to interest rate changes over the sample period considered (Flannery and James 1984a). Interest rate betas do not tell us where the bank’s exposure comes from, that is, what positions generate it. This issue has been investigated by relating interest rate betas to summary statistics of bank positions. For example, interest rate betas have.
