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Discussion Paper
How Were the Basel 3 Minimum Capital Requirements Calibrated?
One way to reduce the likelihood of bank failures is to require banks to hold more and better capital. But how much capital is enough? An international committee of regulators recently reached a new agreement (called Basel 3) to impose new, higher standards for capital on globally active banks. The Basel 3 common equity minimum capital requirement will be 4.5 percent plus an additional buffer of at least 2.5 percent of risk-weighted assets (RWA). Are these numbers big or small?and where did they come from? In this post, I describe how the new Basel capital standards were calibrated.
Discussion Paper
Using Crisis Losses to Calibrate a Regulatory Capital Buffer
In response to the enormous losses experienced during the recent financial crisis, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision reached a new international agreement on the amount of capital banks will be required to hold. The “Basel 3” agreement introduces a new, two-tiered structure for regulatory capital requirements involving much more stringent standards for the amount of common equity banks must hold. In a previous post, I discussed how the minimum capital requirement component of the Basel 3 agreement was calibrated. In this post, I explain how the other component—the common equity ...
Working Paper
Bank Capital Regulations Around the World : What Explains the Differences?
Despite the extensive attention that the Basel capital adequacy standards have received internationally, significant variation exists in the implementation of these standards across countries. Furthermore, a significant number of countries increase or decrease the stringency of capital regulations over time. The paper investigates the empirical determinants of the variation in the data based on the theories of bank capital regulation. The results show that countries with high average returns to investment and a high ratio of government ownership of banks choose less stringent capital ...
Working Paper
How do Capital Requirements Affect Loan Rates? Evidence from High Volatility Commercial Real Estate
We study how bank loan rates responded to a 50% increase in capital requirements for a subcategory of construction lending, High Volatility Commercial Real Estate (HVCRE). To identify this effect, we exploit variation in the loan terms determining whether a loan is classified as HVCRE and the time that a treated loan would be subject to the increased capital requirements. We estimate that the HVCRE rule increases loan rates by about 40 basis points for HVCRE loans, indicating that a one percentage point increase in required capital raises loan rates by about 9.5 basis points.
Working Paper
Understanding Bank and Nonbank Credit Cycles: A Structural Exploration
We explore the structural drivers of bank and nonbank credit cycles using an estimated medium-scale macro model that allows for bank and nonbank financial intermediation. We posit economy-wide aggregate and sectoral disturbances to potentially drive bank and nonbank credit growth. We find that sectoral shocks affecting the balance sheets of entrepreneurs who borrow from the financial sector are important for the business cycle frequency fluctuations in bank and nonbank credit growth. Economy-wide entrepreneurial risk shocks gain predominance for explaining the longer-horizon comovement ...