In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, bank regulators are paying more attention to derivatives. In a move that can be seen as a step away from fair-value accounting, bank regulators (Basel III) have proposed to calculate bank leverage ratios using notional values, rather than fair values, of...

We model a loop between sovereign and bank credit risk. A distressed financial sector induces government bailouts, whose cost leads to increased sovereign credit risk. Increased sovereign credit risk in turn weakens the financial sector by eroding the value of its government debt guarantees and...

In 2001, government guarantees for savings banks in Germany were removed following a lawsuit. We use this natural experiment to examine the effect of government guarantees on bank risk taking. The results suggest that banks whose government guarantee was removed reduced credit risk by cutting...

Following the financial crisis, the share of non-performing loans has significantly increased, while the regulatory guidelines on the Internal-Ratings Based (IRB) approach for capital adequacy calculation related to defaulted exposures remains too general. As a result, the high-risk nature of...

Bank capital requirements are based on a mix of market values and book values. We investigate the effects of a policy change that ties regulatory capital to the market value of the "available-for-sale" investment securities portfolio for some banking organizations. Our analysis is based on...

I provide evidence that loan loss accounting affects procyclical lending through its impact on regulatory actions. Regulators are more likely to place banks with inadequate loan loss allowances under enforcement actions that restrict lending, leading these banks to lend less during downturns....

Sector-specific macroprudential regulations can increase the riskiness of credit to other sectors. First, using cross-country bank-level data we find that after a tightening of household-specific macroprudential policy during a credit expansion, banks with larger portfolios of residential...

We show in a theoretical model that the introduction of the leverage ratio requirement, when it interacts with the risk-based IRB capital requirements, might lead to less lending to low-risk customers and to increased lending to high-risk customers. If such allocational effects are...

In 2001, government guarantees for savings banks in Germany were removed following a law suit. We use this natural experiment to examine the effect of government guarantees on bank risk taking, using a large data set of matched bank/borrower information. The results suggest that banks whose...

The Basel Committee's reform to strengthen the global capital framework, known as Basel III, takes into account a series of measures to address procyclicality and, consequently, make banks' capital requirements more stable during the different phases of the economic cycle. The range of possible...