How accounting and auditing systems can counteract risk-shifting of safety-nets in banking: Some international evidence

This paper suggests that accounting and auditing systems can be effective devices to counteract tendencies for firm risk-taking associated with bank safety nets. Results are obtained from an international sample of publicly traded banks after controlling for other regulatory control devices for bank risk such as restrictions on banking activities, minimum regulatory capital requirements and official discipline. The efficacy of accounting and auditing systems in controlling bank risk diminishes with bank charter value and increases with moral hazard stemming from a country's deposit insurance. The results also indicate that accounting and auditing systems are complements for minimum capital requirements, but substitutes for restrictions on bank activities and official discipline.     

The impact of banking regulations on banks' cost and profit efficiency: Cross-country evidence

This paper uses stochastic frontier analysis to provide international evidence on the impact of the regulatory and supervision framework on bank efficiency. Our dataset consists of 2853 observations from 615 publicly quoted commercial banks operating in 74 countries during the period 2000-2004. We investigate the impact of regulations related to the three pillars of Basel II (i.e. capital adequacy requirements, official supervisory power, and market discipline mechanisms), as well as restrictions on bank activities, on cost and profit efficiency of banks, while controlling for other country-specific characteristics. Our results suggest that banking regulations that enhance market discipline and empower the supervisory power of the authorities increase both cost and profit efficiency of banks. In contrast, stricter capital requirements improve cost efficiency but reduce profit efficiency, while restrictions on bank activities have the opposite effect, reducing cost efficiency but improving profit efficiency.     

Regulations, Supervision Approaches and Acquisition Likelihood in the Asian Banking Industry

We investigate the association between the regulatory and supervision framework and the likelihood of being involved in acquisitions either as acquirer or target in the Asian banking industry over the period 1998–2004. The sample consists of 473 commercial banks operating in 9 markets, a total of 2,693 yearly observations. We use information from the new database of the World Bank and examine various regulations such as the level of accounting and information disclosure requirements, the restrictions on bank activities, the degree of official disciplinary power, and capital adequacy requirements. Our results suggest that the latter two influenced the probability of becoming a target or acquirer; however, restriction on activities and disclosure requirements had no impact on the acquisition likelihood.     

How bank capital buffers vary across countries: The influence of cost of deposits,market power and bank regulation

This paper analyzes the bank and country determinants of capital buffers using a panel data of 1337 banks in 70 countries between 1992 and 2002. After controlling for adjustment costs and the endogeneity of explanatory variables, the results show that capital buffers are positively related to the cost of deposits and bank market power, although the relations vary across countries depending on regulation, supervision, and institutions. Their impact is the result of two generally opposing effects: restrictions on bank activities and official supervision reduce the incentives to hold capital buffers by weakening market discipline, but at the same time they promote higher capital buffers by increasing market power. Institutional quality has the two opposite effects. Better accounting disclosure and less generous deposit insurance, however, have a clear positive effect on capital buffers by both strengthening market discipline and making charter value better able to reduce risk-taking incentives.     

The impact of bank regulations, supervision, market structure, and bank characteristics on individual bank ratings: A cross-country analysis

We use country level data and bank level data from 71 countries and 857 banks to investigate the impact of bank regulations, supervision, market structure, and bank characteristics on individual bank ratings. The results indicate that less cost efficient banks, with higher than average levels of provisions relatively to their income, and lower liquidity tend to have lower ratings. Larger and more profitable banks tend to obtain higher ratings. Higher equity to assets ratio results in higher ratings only when we do not control for bank supervision and regulations. Capital requirements, restrictions on bank activities, official disciplinary power, explicit deposit insurance scheme, higher deposit insurer power, liquidity and diversification guidelines, entry requirements, fraction of entries denied, and economic freedom have a significant impact on ratings in all of our specifications. Disclosure requirements and foreign banks entry have a significant impact on ratings only when we simultaneously control for the regulatory environment and the market structure, while auditing requirements have a significant impact only when we control for the regulatory environment alone. Finally, banks in developed countries are assigned higher ratings. However, this impact disappears when we include the regulatory and supervision variables in the models.     

The regulations–risk taking nexus under competitive pressure: What about the Islamic banking system?

Does market power condition the effect of bank regulations and supervision on bank risk taking? We focus on three regulatory tools: capital requirements, the restriction of activities, and official supervisory powers. Employing 10 years of unbalanced panel data on 123 Islamic and conventional banks operating in the Middle East and Asia, we arrive at the following conclusions. First, banking market power strengthens the negative impact of capital regulation on bank risk taking. Second, our empirical results suggest that the negative effect of activity restrictions on stability is diminished when banks have greater market power. Finally, we do not find strong evidence that the negative effect of supervisory power on banks’ risk taking is conditioned by their competitive behavior. In further analysis, we differentiate between Islamic and conventional banks regarding their competition, as well as their risk behavior. The results differ according to the banking business model. These findings could be useful for bank regulators in light of the accomplishment of Islamic banks’ regulatory framework. Indeed, the adoption of Basel III represents a significant regulatory challenge, given that it does not take into account the specificities of Islamic banks.     

Statement of the Financial Economists Roundtable: Bank Capital as a Substitute for Prudential Regulation

The Financial CHOICE Act recently passed by the House proposes to create an “off‐ramp” that would allow banks to escape burdensome prudential regulation if the ratio of their equity capital to their total assets is 10% or more. The Financial Economists Roundtable supports this idea as a means of reducing regulatory costs, but believes some additional safeguards are needed. A capital ratio of 10% may not be high enough to discourage banks from excessive risk taking. A solution is to have two capital requirements for banks choosing the off‐ramp: one absolute (as proposed in the act) and one risk‐based. The FER believes that many banks will prefer this regime to the current burdensome prudential regulation, especially if regulators simplify the setting of risk weights and make them more rule‐based. Regulators setting minimum capital requirements should consider not only a bank’s stand‐alone risk, but also the systemic risk posed by banks, as well as the tendency of accounting measures of income and assets to overstate the economic value of banks’ equity capital. The Financial Choice Act would also eliminate useful elements of ongoing supervision and regulation, not all of which can be addressed by higher capital alone. Furthermore, to facilitate regulatory learning about risks, off‐ramped banks should continue to report the data that regulators use for stress tests, even if they are no longer subjected to the discipline of stress tests. Finally, the act is viewed as too permissive in its treatment of off‐ramped banks that get into trouble. To prevent gaming of regulation, FERC recommends that off‐ramped banks that subsequently fall below the minimum requirements should be required to raise new capital immediately.     

Effectiveness of Capital Regulation at U.S. Commercial Banks, 1985 to 1994

Unless priced and administered appropriately, a governmental safety net enhances risk-shifting opportunities for banks. This paper quantifies regulatory efforts to use capital requirements to control risk-shifting by U.S. banks during 1985 to 1994 and investigates how much risk-based capital requirements and other deposit-insurance reforms improved this control. We find that capital discipline did not prevent large banks from shifting risk onto the safety net. Banks with low capital and debt-to-deposits ratios overcame outside discipline better than other banks. Mandates introduced by 1991 legislation have improved but did not establish full regulatory control over bank risk-shifting incentives.     

Banking Competition and Capital Ratios

Empirical studies provide evidence that bank capital ratios exceed regulatory requirements. But why do banks maintain capital levels above regulatory requirements? We use data for more than 2,600 banks from 10 European countries to test recent theories suggesting that competition incentivises banks to maintain higher capital ratios. These theories also predict that banks that engage in arm's length lending have lower capital ratios, and that shareholder rights and deposit insurance characteristics affect capital ratios. Consistent with these theories, our evidence robustly indicates that competition increases capital holdings. Banks that lend at arm's length exhibit lower capital ratios, whereas banks in countries with strong shareholder rights operate with higher capital ratios. We also show some evidence that generous deposit protection schemes that exclude non‐deposit creditors are associated with higher capital ratios. Our results have important policy implications. First, while the traditional view suggests imposing restrictions on bank activities in order to restrain competition, our analysis indicates the opposite, even after adjusting the regressions for risk‐taking. Second, weak shareholder rights undermine market forces that would otherwise encourage banks to hold higher capital ratios.     

Procyclicality in Basel II: Can we treat the disease without killing the patient?

The debate over the potential procyclicality of bank capital requirements under Basel II has focused overwhelmingly on peak-to-trough variation in minimum regulatory requirements. In this paper, we re-examine the problem from the perspective of market discipline. First, we show that the marginal impact of introducing Basel II depends strongly on the extent to which market discipline leads banks to vary lending standards procyclically in the absence of binding regulation. Second, we evaluate policy options not only by their efficacy in dampening cyclicality in capital requirements, but equally by how well the information value of Basel II market disclosures is preserved.     

Getting the Right Mix of Capital and Cash Requirements in Prudential Bank Regulation*

Cash reserve requirements are useful as a broadly conceived prudential tool, not just as a narrowly focused means of limiting the risks associated with illiquidity. Indeed, illiquidity risk is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for establishing bank liquidity requirements. The primary means of mitigating the systemic costs of bank illiquidity risk is the creation of an effective lender of last resort (LOLR). But instead of focusing narrowly on bank funding risks when designing liquidity requirements, regulators should consider tradeoffs among capital requirements, liquidity requirements, and LOLR policies for achieving the broader prudential goal of limiting bank default risk. When considering the optimal tradeoff between capital ratios and cash ratios as prudential requirements, five “frictions” are identified that favor the use of one or the other: (1) the adverse‐selection costs of raising equity (which favors the use of cash); (2) the opportunity cost of forgone abnormal profits (or “quasi rents”) from lending (which favors the use of capital); (3) the limited verifiability of loan outcomes (which favors the use of cash); (4) the moral hazard that results from costly or postponed loss recognition, given the incentive for risk shifting in bad states (which favors the use of cash); and (5) the prospect of changes in the risk environment (which favors cash since it creates greater option value for maintaining targeted default risk with lower adjustment costs in the face of changing loan risk or illiquidity risk). When viewed from the perspective of achieving the main prudential goal of controlling default risk at a minimum social cost, capital requirements have some limitations that favor liquidity requirements, and vice versa. And thus the optimal regulatory policy will combine liquidity and capital requirements.     

“When the cat's away the mice will play”: Does regulation at home affect bank risk-taking abroad?

This paper provides the first empirical evidence that bank regulation is associated with cross-border spillover effects through the lending activities of large multinational banks. We analyze business lending by 155 banks to 9,613 firms in 1,976 different localities across 16 countries. We find that lower barriers to entry, tighter restrictions on bank activities, and to a lesser degree higher minimum capital requirements in domestic markets are associated with lower bank lending standards abroad. The effects are stronger when banks are less efficiently supervised at home, and are observed to exist independently from the impact of host-country regulation.     

Do loan loss reserves behave like capital? Evidence from recent bank failures

Regulatory capital guidelines allow for loan loss reserves to be added back as capital. Our evidence suggests that the influence of loan loss reserves added back as regulatory capital (hereafter referred to as “add-backs”) on bank risk cannot be explained by either economic principles underlying the notion of capital or accounting principles underlying the recording of reserves. Specifically, we observe that, in sharp contrast to the economic notion of capital as a buffer against bank failure risk, add-backs are positively associated with the risk of bank failure during the recent economic crisis. Furthermore, the positive association of add-backs with bank failure risk is concentrated among cases in which the add-backs are highly likely to increase a bank’s total regulatory capital. The evidence cannot thus be fully explained by accounting principles either, since the role of loan loss reserves according to those principles does not depend on whether the reserves generate a regulatory capital increase. Additional analysis suggests that the observed influence of loan loss reserves on bank failure risk may be an unintended consequence of their regulatory treatment as capital.     

Bank Capital and Risk: Is Voluntary Disclosure Enough?

This paper considers whether banks have an incentive to disclose accurate information concerning their risk and capital adequacy. State-of-the-art capital regulation relies on quantitative capital requirements, bank supervision, and public disclosure of information to the markets. Is voluntary regulatory disclosure of risk information sufficient to achieve policy objectives? The game-theoretic model of this paper suggests that voluntary disclosure can be usefully supplemented with other regulatory tools, in particular with direct supervision and financial market discipline.     

Cross-country determinants of bank income smoothing by managing loan-loss provisions

This paper studies the determinants of income smoothing by management of loan-loss provisions in banks around the world. Using a panel database of 3221 bank-year observations from 40 countries and controlling for unobservable bank effects and for the endogeneity of explanatory variables, we find that bank income smoothing depends on investor protection, disclosure, regulation and supervision, financial structure, and financial development. Results suggest there is less bank income smoothing not only with the strength of investor protection, but also with the extent of accounting disclosure, restrictions on bank activities, and official and private supervision, while there is more income smoothing with market orientation and development of a country’s financial system.     

银行信贷、资本监管双重顺周期性与逆周期金融监管

商业银行信贷和资本监管具有顺周期性.银行信贷顺周期性导致经济繁荣时期的贷款扩张和经济衰退时的贷款紧缩.<巴塞尔资本协议Ⅱ>下的资本监管约束,在经济衰退时会促使银行形成信贷萎缩效应,影响和制约货币政策有效性的发挥,次贷危机为<巴塞尔资本协议Ⅱ>下的银行风险管理和监管的创新带来了新的要求和挑战.要减轻顺周期的影响,增强金融...     

银行监管和股东属性对银行风险的影响——基于新兴经济体的监管数据分析

银行监管按世界银行的标准划分为总体监管和12类分项监管;银行大股东属性包括政府类、金融企业类、外资类等.总体监管可以有效地降低银行风险;大股东为工业类、金融类企业的银行能够更好地控制风险,而家族类银行的风险程度较高;通过对分项监管进行研究可以发现,加强对所有权、资本要求、经营活动限制、外部审计要求、流动性、存款保险制度、退出及监管效率八个方面的监管可降低银行总体风险,而加强准入、内部管理、资产分类配置、信息披露这四类监管反而会增加银行总体风险.     

Credit Card Securitization and Regulatory Arbitrage

This paper explores the motivations and desirability of off-balance sheet financing of credit card receivables by banks. We explore three related issues: the degree to which securitizations result in the transfer of risk out of the originating bank, the extent to which securitization permits banks to economize on capital by avoiding regulatory minimum capital requirements, and whether banks' avoidance of minimum capital regulation through securitization with implicit recourse has been undesirable from a regulatory standpoint. We show that regulatory capital arbitrage is an important consequence of securitization. The avoidance of capital requirements could be motivated either by efficient contracting or by safety net abuse. We find that securitizing banks set their capital relative to managed assets according to market perceptions of their risk, and seem not to be motivated by maximizing implicit subsidies relating to the government safety net when managing their risk. This evidence is more consistent with the efficient contracting view of securitization with implicit recourse than with the safety net abuse view.     

Hedging derivatives in the banking industry: Evidence of investor confusion

Hedging derivatives are complex instruments that require particular scrutiny by bank regulators to ensure that a bank’s risk profile is consistent with sound banking practices. The Basel II agreement envisions a system of banking oversight that includes market discipline as a key element of the regulatory framework. A necessary condition in achieving market discipline is that market participants must be able to decipher the underlying conditions from reported results. We examine the relationship between investor confusion and the income effects arising from fair value recognition of hedging derivatives in the banking industry. We use abnormal trading volume as a proxy for investor confusion, and we find a positive and significant relationship between fair value accounting incomes and two alternative measures of abnormal trading volume. The findings suggest that accounting requirements alone may be insufficient to communicate the complexities of hedging derivatives to investors in a way that achieves the market discipline prescribed by Basel II. Bank regulators may need to augment extant efforts for transparency to ensure that risks are adequately communicated to the market.     

Does Macro‐Prudential Regulation Leak? Evidence from a UK Policy Experiment

The regulation of bank capital as a means of smoothing the credit cycle is a central element of forthcoming macro‐prudential regimes internationally. For such regulation to be effective in controlling the aggregate supply of credit it must be the case that: (i) changes in capital requirements affect loan supply by regulated banks, and (ii) unregulated substitute sources of credit are unable to offset changes in credit supply by affected banks. This paper examines micro evidence—lacking to date—on both questions, using a unique data set. In the UK, regulators have imposed time‐varying, bank‐specific minimum capital requirements since Basel I. It is found that regulated banks (UK‐owned banks and resident foreign subsidiaries) reduce lending in response to tighter capital requirements. But unregulated banks (resident foreign branches) increase lending in response to tighter capital requirements on a relevant reference group of regulated banks. This “leakage” is substantial, amounting to about one‐third of the initial impulse from the regulatory change.