Should Bank Capital Regulation Be Risk Sensitive?

Toni Ahnert, James Chapman and Carolyn Wilkins

Staff Working Papers from Bank of Canada

Abstract: We present a simple model to study the risk sensitivity of capital regulation. A banker funds investment with uninsured deposits and costly capital, where capital resolves a moral hazard problem in the banker’s choice of risk. Investors are uninformed about investment quality, but a regulator receives a signal about it and imposes minimum capital requirements. With a perfect signal, capital requirements are risk sensitive and achieve the first-best levels of risk and intermediation: safer banks attract cheaper deposit funding and require less capital. With a noisy signal, risk-sensitive capital regulation can implement a separating equilibrium in which low-quality banks do not participate. We show that the degree of risk sensitivity is non-monotone in the precision of the signal and in investment characteristics. Without a signal, a leverage ratio still induces the efficient risk choice but leads to excessive or insufficient intermediation.

Keywords: Financial institutions; Financial system regulation and policies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G21 G28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban, nep-cba and nep-rmg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.bankofcanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/swp2018-48.pdf

Related works:
Journal Article: Should bank capital regulation be risk sensitive? (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:bca:bocawp:18-48

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Staff Working Papers from Bank of Canada 234 Wellington Street, Ottawa, Ontario, K1A 0G9, Canada. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().