The Determinants of the Performance of the Banking Sector: Evidence from City Commercial Banks in China

The performance of city commercial banks (CCBs) is consistently regarded as a key criterion for assessing their competitiveness within the industry. The continuous pursuit of performance growth remains a fundamental objective for every city commercial bank. This study examines the impact of internal risk governance, along with various internal and external factors, on the performance of CCBs. A total of 35 city commercial banks were selected for analysis from 2011 to 2022, categorizing the samples into state-owned and non-state-owned groups based on ownership structure. A two-way fixed-effects model was employed for this analysis. The findings indicate that: for state-owned banks, the improvement of internal risk governance has a greater positive impact on bank performance than for non-state-owned banks; for state-owned banks, income diversification has a positive effect on bank performance, while for non-state-owned banks, the impact of income diversification on bank performance is negative but not significant; this study also finds that the higher the proportion of non-state-owned holdings, the higher the bank performance.