Bank solvency: The role of credit and liquidity risks, regulatory capital and economic stability

Regulators responded with an array of strategies to shore up weaknesses exposed by the 2008 financial crisis. This chapter focuses on reforms to bank capital regulation. We first discuss the ways in which the post-crisis Basel III reforms recalibrated the existing framework by improving the quality of capital, increasing the quantity of capital, and improving the calculation of risk weights. We then shift to the major structural changes in the regulatory capital framework—capital buffers on top of the minimum requirements; a leverage ratio that explicitly accounts for off-balance-sheet exposures; risk-based and leverage capital surcharges on the largest banks; bail-in debt to facilitate orderly resolution; and forward-looking stress tests. We conclude with a quantitative assessment of the evolution of capital in the global banking system and in the US banking sector.

Much of the work of the Financial Sector Assessment Program (FSAP) was conducted prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, with the missions ending on February 13, 2020. Given the FSAP’s focus on medium-term challenges and vulnerabilities, however, its findings and recommendations for strengthening policy and institutional frameworks remain pertinent. The report was updated to reflect key developments and policy changes since the mission work was completed. It also includes a risk analysis that quantifies the possible impact of the COVID-19 crisis on bank solvency. Since the previous FSAP in 2015, the Norwegian authorities have taken welcome steps to strengthen the financial system. Regulatory capital requirements for banks were raised and actions were taken to bolster the weak capital position of insurers. Alongside other macroprudential measures, temporary borrower-based measures for residential mortgages were introduced, which seem to have had some moderating impact on segments of the housing market. The resolution framework was also strengthened, with the implementation of the Bank Recovery and Resolution Directive (BRRD) and the designation of Finanstilsynet (FSA) as the resolution authority.

ABSTRACT We show how shareholder-debtholder agency conflicts interact with strategic reporting under asymmetric information to influence bank regulation. Relative to a benchmark unregulated economy, higher capital requirements mitigate inefficient asset substitution, but potentially exacerbate underinvestment due to debt overhang. The optimal regulatory policy balances distortions created by agency conflicts and asymmetric information while incorporating the social benefit of bank debt. Asymmetric information and strategic reporting only impact regulation for intermediate social debt benefit levels. For lower social debt benefits in this interval, regulatory capital requirements are insensitive to accounting reports, so bank balance sheets need not be marked to market to implement the optimal regulatory policy. For higher social debt benefits, however, capital requirements are sensitive to accounting reports, thereby necessitating mark-to-market accounting to implement bank regulation. Mark-to-market accounting is essential when bank leverage levels are high, and is more likely to be necessary as banks' asset risk or specificity increases.

Purpose This analysis asks whether regulatory capital requirements capture differences in systematic risk for large firms and micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs). The authors explore whether bank capital regulations intended to support SMEs’ access to borrowing are effective. The purpose of this paper is to find out whether the regulatory design (particularly the estimate of asset correlations) positively affects the lending process to small and medium enterprises, compared to large corporates. Design/methodology/approach The authors investigate the appropriateness of bank capital requirements considering default risk of loans to MSMEs and distortions in capital charges between MSMEs and large firms under the Basel III framework. The authors compiled firm-level data to capture the proportions of MSMEs and large firms in Italy during 2000–2014. The data set is drawn from financial reports of 708,041 firms over 15 years. Unlike most empirical studies that correlate assets and defaults, this study assesses a firm’s creditworthiness not by agency ratings or by sampling banks but by a specific model to estimate one-year probabilities of default. Findings The authors found that asset correlations increase with firms’ size and that large firms face considerably greater systematic risk than MSMEs. However, the empirical values are much lower than regulatory values. Moreover, when the authors focused on the MSME segment, systematic risk is rather stable and varies significantly with turnover. This analysis showed that the regulatory supporting factor represents a valuable attempt to treat MSME loans more fairly with respect to banks’ capital requirements. Basel III-internal ratings-based approach results show that when the supporting factor is applied, the Risk-Weighted-Assets (RWA) differences between MSMEs and large firms increase. Research limitations/implications The implications of this research is that banking regulators to make MSMEs support more effective should review asset correlation estimation criteria, refining the fitting with empirical evidence. Practical implications The asset correlation parameter stipulated by the Basel framework is invariant with economic cycles, decreases with borrowers’ probability of default and increases with borrowers’ assets. The authors found that those relations do not hold. This way, asset correlations fall below parameters defined by regulatory formula, and SMEs’ credit risk could be overstated, resulting in a capital crunch. Originality/value The original contribution of this paper is to demonstrate that the gap between empirical and regulatory capital charge remains high. When the authors examined the Basel III-IRBA, results showed that when the supporting factor is applied, the RWA differences between MSMEs and large firms increase. This is particularly strong for loans to small- and medium-sized companies. Correctly calibrating asset correlations associated with the supporting factor eliminates regulatory distortions, reducing the gap in capital charges between loans to large corporate and MSMEs.

The Basel accord describes the regulatory capital requirements for credit, market and operational risk. The accord aims to provide guidelines to level the playing field for all internationally active banks and to protect consumers against these risks. Despite the growing significance to bank solvency of liquidity risk, it is omitted from the new accord2. Banks are not required to measure and manage this risk yet they are often considerably exposed to the threat of severely diminished liquidity. This omission from the accord could have dire consequences for banks and the economy in which they operate: liquidity crises can occur without warning and spread quickly to other parts of the financial system. This article critically explores current practices in South Africa and proposes guidelines for effective liquidity risk regulation.

There has been growing concerns over the financial soundness of SACCOs with a few having collapsed in the recent past. Empirical evidence indicates that there exists a strong association between efficiency and stability of financial institutions and that an efficient banking sector is better able to withstand negative shocks in case of financial crises. The study first sought to evaluate the financial intermediation efficiency of deposit taking SACCOs (DTSs) and subsequently determine the relationship between selected firm characteristics and financial intermediation efficiency. Specifically, the relationship between asset quality, income diversification, profitability & size and financial intermediation efficiency was assessed. A balanced panel data for 103 DTSs over the period 2011-2014 was collected and analyzed using a two staged methodology. In the first stage, efficiency scores were generated using data envelopment analysis (DEA). DEA Computer Program Version 2.1 was used to generate the efficiency scores. In the second stage, firm characteristics were regressed on the efficiency scores using fixed effects panel regression model. The bias corrected efficiency score were used instead of conventional DEA scores and incorporated into EViews version 8 for regression analysis. Fixed effect model with robust standard errors was used for analysis. The study revealed that asset quality had a direct relationship with intermediation efficiency. This implies that as the asset quality improves, efficiency of a DTS increases. Diversification was found to be hurting efficiency. More profitable DTSs were found to be more efficient indicating that profitability is efficiency enhancing. The results also revealed a positive relationship between size and efficiency. The study recommends that managers and policy makers should concentrate on how to improve the managerial efficiency and also increase the size of SACCOs. Policy framework should also be directed towards encouraging DTSs to consolidate their operations and limit their diversification into noninterest income.

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.

This chapter discusses the concept of bank capital. The essence of regulatory capital requirements as originally conceived was to procure that banks had sufficient capital to absorb both expected and unexpected losses. However, recent market developments have indicated two different but important functions of capital. Going Concern Capital is that capital which can absorb losses, both when the firm is in a state of financial health and during periods of financial stress, thus maintaining market confidence in the financial system and avoiding disruption to depositors. Gone Concern Capital is that capital which absorbs losses on the failure of a firm, protecting depositors in a winding up or resolution. The remainder of the chapter covers Tier 1 and Tier 2 capital; deductions; bank holdings in banking, financial, and insurance entities; provisioning, expected loss and revaluation; and capital monitoring.

The pre-eminence of Islamic finance from the perspective of economic growth has been a long-standing debate. In recent decades, there has been a paradigm shift from interest-based banking to Islamic financial system. This study intends to examine the dynamic interaction of Islamic financial depth (IFD), Islamic financial intermediation (IFI), and asset quality with economic growth in a dual banking system. The paper employs autoregressive distributive lag regression (ARDL), error correction model (ECM) and Granger causality to examine the long and short run linkage by using the quarterly data of Pakistan from 2005 to 2019. The authors run two models to analyze the relative importance of financial depths (Islamic and conventional), financial intermediation (Islamic and conventional), and asset quality of both financial systems. A long-run relationship flowing from finance to growth in both Islamic and conventional finance models has been observed in our study. Furthermore, the findings recommend that strong financial intermediation plays an imperative role in driving economic growth by both financial sectors. The presence of a higher degree of Islamic financial assets in the economy contributes towards economic growth in the short-run. The results show that asset quality possibly plays an important intervening role in the overall finance-growth nexus.