Potential Competitive Effects of Basel II on Banks in SME Credit Markets in the United States

We examine the likely competitive effects of implementation of Basel II capital requirements on banks in the market for credit to SMEs in the U.S. Similar competitive effects from Basel II may occur for other credits and financial instruments in the U.S. and other nations. We address whether reduced risk weights for SME credits extended by large banking organizations that adopt the Advanced Internal Ratings-Based (A-IRB) approach of Basel II might significantly adversely affect the competitive positions of other organizations. The analyses suggest only relatively minor competitive effects on most community banks because the large A-IRB adopters tend to make very different types of SME loans to different types of borrowers than community banks. However, there may be significant adverse effects on the competitive positions of large non-A-IRB banking organizations because the data do not suggest any strong segmentation in SME credit markets among large organizations. JEL classification: G21, G28, G38, L51     

The pass-through of bank capital requirements to corporate lending spreads

We study the impact of higher bank capital requirements on corporate lending spreads using granular bank- and loan-level data. Our empirical strategy employs the heterogeneity in capital requirements across banks and time of implementation in Switzerland. We find that changes in the capital deviation from the regulatory minimum affect lending spreads asymmetrically. In response to a reduction in the capital deviation, banks with deficits with respect to their risk-weighted capital requirement raise spreads relative to banks with surpluses and de-leverage. Banks respond to higher requirements by raising spreads and, for deficit banks, by cutting lending.     

新巴塞尔协议及其对我国银行业的影响

自 1999年 6月首次征求意见稿面世以来 ,新巴塞尔协议已引起国际银行界的普遍关注。与1988年协议相比 ,新协议的内容更广泛、更复杂 ,这充分地反映了银行业的进步。毫无疑问 ,新协议的实施与推广也必将给银行业带来深刻的影响。本文在简要介绍新协议主要更新内容的基础上重点分析了它给我国银行业所带来的影响。     

关于透明度原则中国银行业与新巴塞尔资本协议的要求还差多远

新巴塞尔资本协议较旧巴塞尔协议最大的突破是在银行监管中引入了透明度原则,即信息披露制度.该制度立足于社会利益论、立足于银行是一个公众公司.信息披露制度是市场约束的基础和保障、是第一支柱和第二支柱的补充、是一种有限信息披露的理念.但该制度要求范围过于宽泛增加了银行的无效成本,在统一标准方面尚存在一些问题.     

新兴市场国家新资本协议实施情况及其发展趋势

本文评述了新资本协议全球实施情况,重点分析了新资本协议在新兴市场国家实施的最新进展,深入剖析了新兴市场国家实施新巴塞尔协议的战略框架和路径,探讨了实施路径、实施成本、实施基础等几个核心问题,以及对我国商业银行实施新资本协议的启示。     

Cyclical adjustment of capital requirements: A simple framework

We present a model of an economy with heterogeneous banks that may be funded with uninsured deposits and equity capital. Capital serves to ameliorate a moral hazard problem in the choice of risk. There is a fixed aggregate supply of bank capital, so the cost of capital is endogenous. A regulator sets risk-sensitive capital requirements in order to maximize a social welfare function that incorporates a social cost of bank failure. We consider the effect of a negative shock to the supply of bank capital and show that optimal capital requirements should be lowered. Failure to do so would keep banks safer but produce a large reduction in aggregate investment. The result provides a rationale for the cyclical adjustment of risk-sensitive capital requirements.     

Liquidity and bank capital structure

Bank capital requirements reduce the probability of bank failure and help mitigate taxpayers’ sharing in the losses that result from bank failures. Under Basel III, direct capital requirements are supplemented with liquidity requirements. Our results suggest that liquidity provisions of banks are connected to bank capital and that changes in liquidity indirectly affect the capital structure of financial institutions. Liquidity appears to be another instrument for adjusting bank capital structure beyond just capital requirements. Consistent with Diamond and Rajan (2005), we find that liquidity and capital should be considered jointly for promoting financial stability.     

The role of regulatory capital in international bank mergers and acquisitions

When investigating the role of regulatory capital in bank mergers and acquisitions (M&As) we finds that US targets are better capitalized than their acquirers and non-acquired peers and that US banks maintain higher capital levels than European banks. Thus, US banks strategically raise their capital levels to avoid regulatory scrutiny. Furthermore, more value is created for targets with high excess capital and in M&As involving targets with considerably higher excess-capital ratios than their acquirers. Thus, the excess regulatory capital hypothesis is supported. Finally, market prices reflect the influence that capital has on the probability of the merger's regulatory approval.     

Theories of bank behavior under capital regulation

This paper reviews academic studies of bank capital regulation in an effort to evaluate the intellectual foundation for the imposition of the Basel I and Basel II systems of risk-based capital requirements. The theoretical literature yields general agreement about the immediate effects of capital requirements on bank lending and loan rates and the longer-term impacts on bank ratios of equity to total or risk-adjusted assets. This literature produces highly mixed predictions, however, regarding the effects of capital regulation on asset risk and overall safety and soundness for the banking system as a whole. Thus, the intellectual foundation for the present capital-regulation regime is not particularly strong. The mixed conclusions in the academic literature on banking certainly do not provide unqualified support for moving to an even more stringent and costly system of capital requirements. These widely ambiguous results do suggest, however, that assessing the implications of capital regulation for balance-sheet risk and monitoring effort in diverse banking systems is an important agenda for future theoretical research in the banking area.     

新资本协议下经济资本计量的实用方法

经济资本是新资本协议下银行信用风险控制与管理的重要手段,但在实践中却远未成熟。本文辨析了非预期损失和经济资本的关系,从符合监管要求和便于操作实施的角度出发,介绍了基于期权定价理论和基于新资本协议资本计提公式的实用计量方法．从理论依据、计算步骤和应用评价三个维度进行了阐述。最后,对商业银行实施经济资本计量提出了若干建议。     

Banking on the principles: Compliance with Basel Core Principles and bank soundness

This study finds that banks receive more favorable Moody's financial strength ratings in countries with better compliance with Basel Core Principles related to information provision. The results are robust to controlling for broad indexes of institutional quality, macroeconomic variables, sovereign ratings, and reverse causality. Compliance with other Core Principles does not affect ratings robustly. Measuring bank soundness through Z-scores yields broadly similar results for advanced and emerging markets. Countries aiming to upgrade banking regulation and supervision should consider giving priority to information provision over other elements of the core principles.     

中国商业银行资本监管:制度变迁和效果评价

资本监管是审慎银行监管的核心。上个世纪90年代以来,我国监管当局开始建立并逐步改进资本监管制度。本文分银行体制商业化转型初期、市场化银行体制形成时期、银行体系日益国际化时期三个阶段,对我国商业银行资本监管制度变迁过程进行系统性考察,全面评估不同时期资本监管的效果。本文认为,国有银行改革、银行体系开放、增强银行体系稳健性和资本监管制度与国际标准接轨四个方面因素的相互作用,为资本监管制度变迁注入的动力,决定了资本监管制度演进的方向;资本监管制度的变革既反映监管当局风险监管理念的进步,也体现了监管当局为增强银行体系稳健性、推动银行业改革和促进经济增长等多目标同时实现所做的持续努力和必要妥协。     

The cyclical effects of the Basel II capital requirements

Capital requirements play a key role in the supervision and regulation of banks. The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision is in the process of changing the current framework by introducing risk sensitive capital charges. Some fear that this will unduly increase the volatility of regulatory capital. Furthermore, by limiting the banks’ ability to lend, capital requirements may exacerbate an economic downturn. The paper examines the problem of capital-induced lending cycles and their pro-cyclical effect on the macroeconomy in greater detail. It finds that the capital buffer that banks hold on top of the required minimum capital plays a crucial role in mitigating the impact of the volatility of capital requirements.     

关于巴塞尔协议规避银行系统危机的有效性研究

对银行实施监管是银行界的共识,最近几十年来,全球最核心的监管条例无疑就是巴塞尔协议。从巴塞尔委员会成立起,协议的修改和完善就从未停止,但即便如此,世界上两大经济体美国和欧盟都发生了足以载入史册的金融危机。那么,以巴塞尔协议为代表的规制能否彻底解决银行系统危机问题呢?本文以巴塞尔协议作为主要的研究对象,论证仅仅用规制的方式难以避免系统性风险,银行不仅需要市场化的资源配置手段,同时也需要直接的计划调控手段规避系统性风险。     

Rethinking bank shareholder equity: The case of Deutsche Bank

We introduce and apply an innovative accounting approach to analyse the equity position of a European systemically important financial institution, Deutsche Bank, between 2001 and 2015. According to our findings, the actual contribution by shareholders to bank equity capital was limited, while shareholder payout policies, including share buybacks and trading on its own shares, were both material. These findings raise concerns on the actual capacity by shareholder equity to assure protection against (residual) risk and loss absorption. Customer and investor protections appear to lay with bank entity equity dynamics. These findings have implications for bank financial sustainability and resilience, company capital maintenance, and regulatory capital requirements. Further developments based upon this innovative methodology may improve on existing prudential and accounting regulations.     

The welfare cost of bank capital requirements

Capital requirements are the cornerstone of modern bank regulation, yet little is known about their welfare cost. This paper measures this cost and finds that it is surprisingly large. I present a simple framework, which embeds the role of liquidity creating banks in an otherwise standard general equilibrium growth model. A capital requirement limits the moral hazard on the part of banks that arises due to deposit insurance. However, this capital requirement is also costly because it reduces the ability of banks to create liquidity. The key insight is that equilibrium asset returns reveal the strength of households’ preferences for liquidity and this allows for the derivation of a simple formula for the welfare cost of capital requirements that is a function of observable variables only. Using US data, the welfare cost of current capital adequacy regulation is found to be equivalent to a permanent loss in consumption of between 0.1% and 1%.     

巴塞尔新资本协议与商业银行公司治理

巴塞尔新资本协议所倡导的不仅是全面风险管理的理念和先进的资本计量方法,更蕴含着丰富的公司治理原则和要求,包括:董事会应以全面风险管理的视角制定战略规划,董事会和高级管理层应积极参与全面风险管理体系的运作,商业银行应采取与审慎风险承担有效结合的薪酬激励机制等.在此基础上,本文从战略规划、董事会运作、沟通协调机制、风险管理...     

The Sensitivity of the Loss Given Default Rate to Systematic Risk: New Empirical Evidence on Bank Loans

We verify the existence of a relation between loss given default rate (LGDR) and macroeconomic conditions by examining 11,649 bank loans concerning the Italian market. Using both the univariate and multivariate analyses, we pinpoint diverse macroeconomic explanatory variables for LGDR on loans to households and SMEs. For households, LGDR is more sensitive to the default-to-loan ratio, the unemployment rate, and household consumption. For SMEs, LGDR is influenced by the total number of employed people and the GDP growth rate. These findings corroborate the Basel Committee’s provision that LGDR quantification process must identify distinct downturn conditions for each supervisory asset class.

Effects of the New Basel Capital Accord on Bank Capital Requirements for SMEs

Using data from three countries (US, Italy and Australia) and surveying related studies from several other countries in Europe, we investigate the effects of the New Basel Capital Accord on bank capital requirements for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). We find that, for all the countries, banks will have significant benefits, in terms of lower capital requirements, when considering small and medium sized firms as retail customers. But they will be obliged to use the Advanced IRB approach and to manage them on a pooled basis. For SMEs as corporate, however, capital requirements will be slightly greater than under the existing Basel I Capital Accord. We believe that most eligible banks will use a blended approach (considering some SMEs as retail and some as corporate). Through a breakeven analysis, we find that for all of our countries, banking organizations will be obliged to classify as retail at least 20% of their SME portfolio in order to maintain the current capital requirement (8%). JEL classification: G21, G28