Why do banks optimize risk weights? The relevance of the cost of equity capital

Andrea Beltratti and Giovanna Paladino

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Banks use internal models to optimize risk weights and better account for the specific risk of each asset class. As the choice of a set of risk weights directly amounts to affecting the regulatory capital ratio, economic theory suggests that banks should optimize their risk weights also with respect to the cost and benefit of holding equity capital. Banks with a higher cost of capital, and banks with better growth opportunities, should be more aggressive in reducing risk weights. We consider a large panel of international banks and find that, after controlling for a number of bank and country characteristics, banks do respond to the cost and benefit of holding capital when selecting their average risk weights. We also find that banks that are more aggressive in terms of such optimization have a subsequent lower return on equity and are more likely to have raised capital during the credit crisis.

Keywords: Basel Accord; risk-weighted assets; internal rating models; panel OLS; dynamic system GMM. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 G18 G21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-04-21
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban and nep-rmg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/46410/1/MPRA_paper_46410.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:pra:mprapa:46410

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().