IMPACTO DOS FATORES MACROECONÔMICOS NA RENTABILIDADE DOS MAIORES BANCOS QUE ATUAM NO MERCADO BRASILEIRO NO PERÍODO DE 2000 A 2016 CLASSIFICADOS POR ATIVOS TOTAIS

Abstract

The impact of macroeconomic fluctuations on the profitability of the banking industry has arisen with great frequency and has gained increasing relevance in the empirical literature on corporate finance. This research has the objective of studying the impact of specific macroeconomic factors on the profitability of the largest banks operating in the Brazilian market and thus, provide relevant information as a contribution to the enrichment of the literature on the subject. For this investigation we selected the thirty largest banks operating in the Brazilian banking market from 2000 to 2016 classified by total assets according to information available at BACEN - Central Bank of Brazil. The proxies of profitability, we will work with the ROA - Return on Assets and ROE - Return on Equity indexes that we believe meet the expectations of the research considering the importance of these and the vast literature available. To explain bank profitability, we direct our focus to the impact of external factors as we believe that these are unrelated to managerial decisions and can pose a great challenge to managers. In view of this, five macroeconomic variables were also cited in several studies on the topic proposed here, being: interest rate, inflation, exchange rate, unemployment rate and economic growth. In order to reach the proposed objective, this research intends to answer the following question: What is the impact of macroeconomic variables on the profitability of the largest banks operating in the Brazilian market? For this, econometric analysis was used with unbalanced panel data with information covering the period from 2000 to 2016. The results for the ROA variable pointed out that the economic growth, the oscillation of the inflation indexes and the basic interest rate of the economy have a high statistical significance for explaining bank profitability, but with a negative beta coefficient. In the second analysis, which involved the variable ROE, the model showed us that only economic growth and the inflation rate are significant to explain the profitability of the banking institutions investigated in this study. In this way, we understand that the results of this research will allow an advance in the literature on the subject that seeks a better understanding of the impact of specific macroeconomic oscillations on the profitability of the banking industry.