ABSTRACT The financial crisis has demonstrated the need for a set of macroprudential policy tools that can be used to mitigate systemic risk. Focusing on the UK, our paper reviews the performance of the Basel III credit‐to‐GDP gap that, alongside judgement, is to be used as a reference guide...

The banking literature contains only a handful of studies of how bank revenues vary over the business cycle, and nearly all of these studies look exclusively on the net interest margin. The general conclusion has been that the margin tends to increase during recessions and decrease during booms....

While the new capital adequacy framework, Basel II, aims to make the banks’ capital requirements more sensitive to the underlying risk of the assets, it may also introduce an additional source of procyclicality in the banking sector. A growing share of the literature has assessed the potential...

Norges Bank has since 1989 been using a risk index for banks. The purpose of this risk index is to identify potential problem banks, and to obtain a general picture of the health of the banking industry. In 1994 the risk index was reconstructed based on research by Sigbjørn Atle Berg and Barbro...

Bank revenues have a time variation pattern over the business cycle. Since revenues are a major determinant of bank capital and lending capacity, the time variation may have an impact on the real economy and may potentially amplify the business cycle. It will therefore be useful to understand...