This paper studies the effects of the bank capital requirements imposed by the European authorities in October 2011 on loan collateral and personal guarantees usage to enhance capital ratios. We use detailed information on the loan contracts granted by a representative Spanish bank and several...

We study how supranational capital regulation incentivizes national authorities to exercise forbearance and how this affects the regulatory capital of banks across countries. Using the 2011 EBA capital exercise as a quasi-natural experiment, we find that banks substantially inflated their levels...

The internal ratings-based (IRB) approach maps banks’ risk profiles more adequately than the standardized approach. After switching to IRB, banks’ risk-weighted asset (RWA) densities are thus expected to diverge, especially across countries with different supervisory strictness and risk...