This paper develops a framework for analyzing socially and privately optimal bank loan-monitoring decisions, with and without capital regulation. In contrast to the monitoring decision of a social planner who seeks to maximize the utility of aggregate consumption, banks choose to monitor only if doing so is consistent with maximizing the market value of equity. As a consequence, socially and privately optimal monitoring choices can diverge. Under some circumstances, appropriately configured capital regulation can bring private loan-monitoring decisions into line with those of the social planner. Nevertheless, the capital ratio required to attain this outcome hinges on a number of factors that are likely to be economy-specific, including the banking system's monitoring technology and its exposure to default. Thus, it is unlikely that a unique capital ratio will be able to induce socially optimal monitoring in all economies.

This paper extends one aspect of the US stock market study of Fama (1990) and Schwert (1990). We examine the relationship between industrial production (IP) growth rates and lagged real stock returns for the G-7 countries using both in-sample cointegration and error-correction models and the out-of-sample forecast-evaluation procedure of Ashley et al. (1980). The cointegration tests show a long-run equilibrium relationship between the log levels of IP and real stock prices, while the error-correction models indicate a correlation between IP growth and lagged real stock returns for all countries except Italy. The out-of-sample tests show that in several sub-periods the US, UK, Japanese, and Canadian stock markets enhance predictions of future IP.

This paper develops a banking-sector framework with heterogeneous loan monitoring costs. Banks are exposed to the moral hazard behavior of borrowers and endogenously choose whether to monitor their loans to eliminate this exposure. After analyzing an unregulated banking system, we examine several cases in which regulatory capital requirements bind the notional loan supplies of various subsets of banks. To gauge the impact of capital requirements, we define loan ‘quality’ in terms of either the ratio of monitored to total loans or the ratio of monitoring banks to total bank population. Under the assumption of a specific cross-sectional distribution of banks, our simulations show that the imposition of binding capital requirements on a previously unregulated banking system unambiguously increases the market loan rate and reduces aggregate lending, but has an ambiguous effect on loan ‘quality’. Nevertheless, once capital requirements are in place, the simulations indicate that regulators can contribute to higher overall loan ‘quality’ by toughening capital requirements.

Bank equity is exogenous in the standard deposit-and-loan-expansion multiplier model, so that model is inappropriate for analyzing the interaction between monetary and bank regulatory policies. This paper examines the effect of a binding capital requirement on the loan expansion process. We evaluate how the conflict between the monetary and regulatory authorities evolves when bank equity adjusts to a binding capital requirement. We find that capital requirements are not innocuous for monetary policy. Nevertheless, the monetary authority can assert control over the loan expansion process in the long run, although multiplier values will differ considerably from those in the standard multiplier model.