Bank Capital and the Cost of Equity

Mohamed Belkhir, Sami Ben Naceur, Ralph Chami and Anis Semet

No 2019/265, IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund

Abstract: Using a sample of publicly listed banks from 62 countries over the 1991-2017 period, we investigate the impact of capital on banks’ cost of equity. Consistent with the theoretical prediction that more equity in the capital mix leads to a fall in firms’ costs of equity, we find that better capitalized banks enjoy lower equity costs. Our baseline estimations indicate that a 1 percentage point increase in a bank’s equity-to-assets ratio lowers its cost of equity by about 18 basis points. Our results also suggest that the form of capital that investors value the most is sheer equity capital; other forms of capital, such as Tier 2 regulatory capital, are less (or not at all) valued by investors. Additionally, our main finding that capital has a negative effect on banks’ cost of equity holds in both developed and developing countries. The results of this paper provide the missing evidence in the debate on the effects of higher capital requirements on banks’ funding costs.

Keywords: WP; bank capital; capital requirement; financial risk; capital measure; Cost of equity; Banking regulation; Financial stability; return on equity; bank capitalization; bank cost; capitalized bank; bank capital measure; funding cost; financial leverage decrease; risk profile; Stocks; Capital adequacy requirements; Stock markets; Return on investment; Loan loss provisions; Global (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 44
Date: 2019-12-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban, nep-cwa and nep-rmg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=48751 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Bank capital and the cost of equity (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:imf:imfwpa:2019/265

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/pubs/ord_info.htm

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund International Monetary Fund, Washington, DC USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Akshay Modi ().