Jon Danielsson discusses the use of capital ratios and macroprudential regulation and describes the limitations of each policy: How banks can inflate capital ratios, how capital requirements fail to reduce the risk of aggregate shocks and how Basel III regulations burden smaller banks relative...

Banks operating under Value-at-Risk constraints give rise to a welldefined aggregate balance sheet capacity for the banking sector as a whole that depends on total bank capital. Equilibrium risk and market risk premiums can be solved in closed form as functions of aggregate bank capital. We...

Reliable indicators of future financial crises are important for policymakers and practitioners. While most indicators consider an observation of high volatility as a warning signal, this column argues that such an alarm comes too late, arriving only once a crisis is already under way. A better...