Search Results
Working Paper
Banking Regulation with Risk of Sovereign Default
Banking regulation routinely designates some assets as safe and thus does not require banks to hold any additional capital to protect against losses from these assets. A typical such safe asset is domestic government debt. There are numerous examples of banking regulation treating domestic government bonds as ?safe,? even when there is clear risk of default on these bonds. We show, in a parsimonious model, that this failure to recognize the riskiness of government debt allows (and induces) domestic banks to ?gamble? with depositors? funds by purchasing risky government bonds (and assets ...
Report
Payout Restrictions and Bank Risk-Shifting
What are the effects of payout restrictions on bank risk-shifting? To answer this question, we exploit the restriction policies imposed during the Covid-crisis on US banks as a natural experiment. Using a high-frequency differences-in-differences empirical strategy, we show that, when share buybacks are banned and dividends restricted, banks’ equity prices fall while their CDS spreads and bond yields decline. These results indicate that payout restrictions shift risk from debtholders into equityholders. Consistent with a risk-shifting channel, we find that these effects revert once ...