Is window dressing by banks systemically important?

Luis Garcia, Ulf Lewrick and Taja Sečnik

No 960, BIS Working Papers from Bank for International Settlements

Abstract: We study banks' year-end window dressing in the European Union to assess how it affects the identification of global systemically important banks (G-SIBs) and the associated capital surcharges. We find that G-SIBs compress their balance sheet at year-end to an extent that they can reduce their surcharges or avoid G-SIB designation altogether. G-SIBs use several levers to adjust their balance sheets. Most notably, they compress intra-financial system assets and liabilities as well as their derivative books at year-end. Moreover, G-SIBs that are more tightly constrained by capital requirements window dress more than their peers. Our findings underscore the importance of supervisory judgement in the assessment of G-SIBs and call for greater use of average as opposed to point-in-time data to measure banks' systemic importance.

Keywords: systemically important bank; systemic risks; regulatory arbitrage; financial stability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G20 G21 G28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31 pages
Date: 2021-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban, nep-cba and nep-isf
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bis:biswps:960

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