The focus of this article is the debt market as a powerful disciplinarian source for large and complex banking organizations around the world. We empirically study the interactions between reinforcing banks’ market discipline and preserving a level playing field in international banking. Our approach consists of conducting cross-country comparisons of the secondary market prices sensitivity to market measures of bank risk (traditional and financial strength ratings). The results are generally consistent with the market discipline paradigm. However, much progress still needs to be made (especially in Japan and certain European countries) in order to make the level playing field principle compatible with the reinforcement of market discipline on an international level.

The spectacular failure of the 150-year-old investment bank Lehman Brothers on September 15th, 2008 was a major turning point in the global financial crisis that broke out in the summer of 2007. Through the use of stock market data and credit default swap (CDS) spreads, this paper examines investors’ reaction to Lehman's collapse in an attempt to identify a spillover effect on the surviving financial institutions. The empirical analysis indicates that (i) the collateral damage was limited to the largest financial firms; (ii) the institutions most affected were the surviving “non-bank” financial services firms; and (iii) the negative effect was correlated with the financial conditions of the surviving institutions. We also detect significant abnormal jumps in CDS spreads that we interpret as evidence of sudden upward revisions in the market assessment of future default probabilities assigned to the surviving financial firms.

We examine various implementation issues related to the calibration of output floors in setting minimum bank capital requirements under the finalized version of the Basel III capital accord. The main raison d’être of output floors is to limit the capital savings enjoyed by large banks due to regulatory arbitrage under the internal model paradigm. We consider regulatory arbitrage through the bank’s incentive to optimize its grading system in order to lower as much as possible the capital requirement given the structure of its asset portfolio in terms of internal ratings and default probabilities. Based on a fictional portfolio of SME loans observed over a full business cycle, we conduct a counterfactual analysis in order to compare the effect of the output floor implemented with respect to two benchmarks: ( i ) a standardized approach calibrated from credit ratings assigned by external rating agencies, as proposed in the finalized version of the Basel III capital accord; and ( ii ) an alternative, more granular, and comprehensive standardized approach benchmark, based on an external grading system that mimics the in-house credit assessment systems used by certain national central banks. Our results show that a more granular, risk-sensitive, benchmark is likely to reduce the effect of the output floor on the minimum capital requirement. We also reveal that output floors exhibit a countercyclical pattern, which is an interesting feature of the mechanism from a macroprudential point of view.