We explore and summarize the evolution in bank capital regulations and bank risk after the global financial crisis. Using a new survey of bank regulation and supervision covering more than 120 economies, we show that regulatory capital increased, but some elements of capital regulations became laxer. Analyzing bank-level data, we also document the importance of defining bank regulatory capital narrowly as the quality of capital matters in reducing bank risk. This is particularly true for banks that have more discretion in the computation of regulatory capital ratios and are subject to weaker market monitoring.

The vacuum caused by the absence of a political leader has a major economic impact. We manually collect data on the absence of a political leader in 247 Chinese cities between 2009 and 2019 and find that firms reduce their investment by an average of 2.326 % for each month that a political office remains vacant. This result holds even after subjecting the data to a series of endogeneity tests, robustness tests, and alternative explanations. We also demonstrate that the absence of a political leader reduces corporate investment through increased uncertainty of economic policy, reduced governmental efficiency, and disrupted political connections. Finally, our results show that this kind of absence has a more pronounced impact on younger firms, firms located in provinces with slower marketization, firms located in provinces with weak media development, non-state-owned enterprises, and firms located in regions under significant promotional pressure.