The Norwegian experiences of the past thirty years illustrate what we believe are two general tendencies in bank regulation. The first one is that a bank crisis will tend to focus regulators' minds and lead to stricter regulations. The second one is that cycles in regulation tend to interact...

Operating costs in the Norwegian banking sector have been reduced considerably in recent decades, both as a share of income and assets. This has increased banks' resilience to increased losses and reduced the risk of crises. In this article, I analyse how costs have been reduced and the main...