Regulators often delegate monitoring to local supervisors, which can improve information collection, but can also lead to agency problems and capture. We document that following the closure of a US bank regulator’s field offices, the banks they previously supervised actively increased their risk of failure by distributing cash, increasing leverage, and lending more than similar banks at the same time and place. Supervisor proximity is a channel through which these effects operate. Our findings suggest that local supervision is an important part of regulation, as it facilitates collection of information imperfectly reflected in reported measures, and that switching from onsite to offsite supervision can increase bank risk

We analyze the limits of regulating bank CEO compensation to reduce risk shifting in the presence of an active board that retains the right to approve new investment strategies. Compensation regulation prevents overinvestment in strategies that increase risk, but it is ineffective in preventing underinvestment in strategies that reduce risk. The regulator optimally combines compensation and capital regulations. In contrast, if the board delegates the choice of strategy to the CEO, compensation regulation is sufficient to prevent both types of risk shifting. Compensation regulation increases shareholders’ incentives to implement an active board, which reduces the effectiveness of compensation regulation

This article studies the optimal design of bank capital regulations when capital markets are subject to adverse selection. I show how the implementation of capital requirements can eliminate the information frictions that make raising capital costly by screening banks to reveal their private information to the market. The optimal regulations induce information revelation via recapitalization programs when the banking sector is weak and pool the banks’ private information via uniform capital requirements otherwise. Optimal capital requirements are linked to the securities issued to meet them, demonstrating potential welfare gains from incorporating more and less informationally sensitive securities into the design of capital regulations. Finally, the analysis generates insights into the joint design of equity capital requirements and additional tier 1 capital securities

This article studies the disclosure of stress test results by a regulator who is privately informed about bank health when she chooses the stress scenario. I show that the regulator’s choice of the stress scenario depends on how heterogeneous health is across banks. There can be fewer runs than under transparency. However, there are more runs than when the regulator chooses the scenario before becoming informed, highlighting a time-inconsistency problem. Moreover, disclosure can become a source of informational contagion, as changes in the health of one bank affect beliefs about other banks. The model explains the empirical puzzle that a bank’s share price can fall even though it passes the stress test

Recent literature suggests that higher capital requirements for banks might lead to a socially costly crowding out of deposits by equity. This paper shows that additional equity in banks can help to crowd in deposits. Intuitively, as banks have more equity and become safer, the cost of deposit funding may decline; this, in turn, can encourage banks to expand their deposits. However, I also find that, for this effect to occur, capital requirements may have to be stringent enough: When bank capital is low, a small rise in capital requirements can cause banks to substitute equity for deposits. Overall, a non-monotonic relationship between the required amount of equity in banks and their level of deposit funding obtains

We examine how cross-country differences in capital regulations shape the structure of global lending syndicates. Using globally syndicated loans extended by banks from forty-four countries, we find that strictly regulated banks participate more in syndicates originated by lead lenders facing less stringent capital regulations. The resulting lending syndicates extend loans to riskier borrowers, charge higher spreads, forego covenants more frequently, and incur higher default rates. Such syndication activity also facilitates the access to credit by riskier corporations and exposes both participants and lead arrangers to greater systemic risk. Overall, our finding is consistent with the explanation that strictly regulated banks rely on the expertise of loosely regulated banks to procure risky deals outside the border

We exploit a unique data set of executive turnovers in community banks to test the micro-mechanisms of discipline by examining the monitoring and influencing role of different stakeholders. We find executives are more likely to be dismissed in risky institutions. Examining the roles of shareholders, debtholders, and regulators as monitors, we obtain evidence for shareholder discipline. However, there is no evidence that risk affects dismissals more if debtholders have a larger stake in the bank or when regulators are aware of distress. Examining the roles of shareholders, debtholders, and regulators as monitors, we obtain evidence for shareholder discipline. However, there is no evidence that risk affects dismissals more if debtholders have a larger stake in the bank or when regulators are aware of distress. When we analyze risk, losses, and profitability following turnovers, we obtain no evidence that replacing executives improves performance

The increasing dependence of individuals on debt financing raises several welfare considerations that we analyze in this paper. We develop a dynamic, competitive model of relationship banking to determine how regulation influences borrowing and lending behavior, and analyze how it affects welfare in the market. We characterize the lending regimes that arise based on public policy, and evaluate the optimal choice by the government to induce particular lending practices to arise. Finally, we consider the effect that a credit reporting agency has on the market. In the paper, we highlight the new empirical implications that the model generates

We investigate the bank competition-stability nexus based on a unique regulatory dataset. First, we use outright bank defaults, and control for a wide array of different time-varying bank characteristics which are likely to influence the nexus. Second, we simultaneously include measures of competition and market power corresponding to the bank, county, and federal state level. Third, we investigate the role of bank competition in the transmission of monetary policy to bank risk. From a policy perspective, our findings indicate that competition-reducing regulation does not necessarily enhance either the stability of individual banks or their resilience to monetary policy shocks

Transparency regulation aims at reducing financial fragility by strengthening market discipline. There are, however, two elementary properties of banking that may render such regulation inefficient at best and detrimental at worst. First, an extensive financial safety net may eliminate the disciplinary effect of transparency regulation. Second, achieving transparency is costly for banks, as it dilutes their charter values, and hence also reduces their private costs of risk-taking. We consider both the direct costs of complying with disclosure requirements and the indirect transparency costs stemming from imperfect property rights governing information and particularly infer the conditions under which transparency regulation cannot reduce financial fragility