In December 2010 the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision published a set of new regulations for banks in response to the financial crisis. This paper aims at evaluating the possible effects of the new framework on banks' available regulatory capital and risk-weighted assets and assessing...

Current policy debate has renewed interest in counter-cyclical provisioning policies; dynamic provisions are regarded as a valuable device for pursuing this goal. Last July, Ecofin supported "the introduction of forward-looking provisioning, which consists in constituting provisions deducted...

In the post-crisis era banks' capital adequacy is established by the Basel III capital standards and, in many jurisdictions, also by supervisory stress tests. In this paper we first describe the ways in which supervisory stress tests can supplement the risk-based capital framework of Basel III...

This paper examines the evolution of the Pillar 2 framework for banks, introduced by the Basel 2 Accord, and discusses the main issues at stake in the current policy debate. The main objective of Pillar 2 was to complement the minimum requirements established by regulators (Pillar 1) with...

This paper analyzes the challenges posed by the implementation of the countercyclical capital buffer framework in Italy and proposes ways of meeting them. In the first part of the analysis we review the limitations of the standardized Basel III credit-to-GDP gap; we then propose possible...

While the setting of the countercyclical capital buffer (CCyB) is not an automatic decision, insights from indicators, such as the credit-to-GDP gap, are a starting point to inform the policy decision. This paper identifies an optimal rule to map the credit-to-GDP gap adjusted to the guide to...

We analyse the deleveraging process with reference to a sample of European banks from December 2011 to June 2013 and find that the leverage ratio (measured as assets to equity) has declined on average from 28.6 to 25.0. Its standard deviation fell from 8.2 to 6.5. About 2/3 of the deleveraging...