Bank capital regulations are intended to enhance financial stability in the long run, but may, in the meanwhile, involve costs for the real economy. To examine these costs we propose a narrative index of aggregate tightenings in regulatory US bank capital requirements from 1979 to 2008....

We study how supranational capital regulation incentivizes national authorities to exercise forbearance and how this affects the regulatory capital of banks across countries. Using the 2011 EBA capital exercise as a quasi-natural experiment, we find that banks substantially inflated their levels...

European supervisors aggressively requested more capital at large banks. That may cut credit to the economy. We confirm that especially larger banks cut loans while less-significant banks partly offset that credit drop. Moreover, we identify nasty spillovers from that interaction. Specifically,...