Bank capital ratios across countries: why do they vary?

Elijah Brewer, George G. Kaufman and Larry Wall

No 2008-27, FRB Atlanta Working Paper from Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta

Abstract: This paper extends the literature on bank capital structure by modeling capital structure as a function of important public policy and bank regulatory characteristics of the home country, as well as of bank-specific variables, country-level macroeconomic conditions, and country-level financial characteristics. The model is estimated with annual data from 1992 to 2005 for an unbalanced panel of the seventy-eight largest private banks in the world headquartered in twelve industrial countries. The results indicate that bank capital ratios are significantly affected in the hypothesized directions by most of the bank-specific variables. Several of the country characteristic and policy variables are also significant with the predicted sign: Banks maintain higher capital ratios in home countries in which the bank sector is relatively smaller and in countries that practice prompt corrective actions more actively, have more stringent capital requirements, and have more effective corporate governance structures.

Keywords: Bank; capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban, nep-cba and nep-mac
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (78)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Bank Capital Ratios Across Countries: Why Do They Vary? (2008)
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