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.

We jointly analyze the static, selection, and dynamic effects of domestic, foreign, and state ownership on bank performance. We argue that it is important to include indicators of all the relevant governance effects in the same model. “Nonrobustness” checks (which purposely exclude some indicators) support this argument. Using data from Argentina in the 1990s, our strongest and most robust results concern state ownership. State-owned banks have poor long-term performance (static effect), those undergoing privatization had particularly poor performance beforehand (selection effect), and these banks dramatically improved following privatization (dynamic effect), although much of the measured improvement is likely due to placing nonperforming loans into residual entities, leaving “good” privatized banks.