Bank regulation in general and capital regulation in particular are widely perceived as having become stiffer in the 1990s. The stiffer regulatory environment in turn is argued to have curtailed bank lending. This article determines the extent to which capital standards changed in the 1990s and...

There are two seemingly inconsistent strands of the finance literature regarding the effects of bank capital regulation. On the one hand, the value maximization literature implies that more stringent capital regulation will reduce the probability of bank failure and the risk exposure of the...