Based on these simple descriptive statistics, banking appears to have been a relatively safe and, correspondingly, low return industry during our sample period. This matches the earlier finding by Flannery et al. (2004) that banks may simply be “boring”. Banks’ leverage is, however, substantially different from that of firms. Banks’ median book leverage is and median market leverage is while median book and market leverage of non- financial companies in Frank and Goyal (2004) is 24% and 23%, respectively. While banking is an industry with on average high leverage, there are also a substantial number of non- financial firms.
