Multibank Holding Company Organizational Structure and Performance

Over the past decade, several researchers have suggested thatmultibank holding company organizational structure will systematically influence the performance of subsidiary banks. Specifically, these researchers have hypothesized that the magnitude of affiliation benefits generated by a particular holding company will be positively related to the degree to which control over subsidiary bank decisions and operations is centralized in the hands of the parent corporation.To date, this possibility has been ignored in the empirical studies exploring holding company affiliation impacts, perhaps biasing their results. To obtain insight on this issue, quantitative measures of the organizational centralization of 62 multibank holding companies, derived from survey data, were related to summary measures of holding company profitability. A positive, significant relationship was discovered between these centralization indexes and holding company profitability.