This paper uses granular data on syndicated loans to analyse the impact of international reforms for Global Systemically Important Banks (G-SIBs) on bank lending behaviour. Using a difference-in-differences estimation strategy, we find no effect of the reforms on overall credit supply, while at the same time documenting a substantial decline in borrower- and loan-specific risk factors for the affected banks. Moreover, we detect a significant decline in the pricing gap between interest rates charged by G-SIBs and other banks, which we interpret as indirect evidence for a reduction in funding cost subsidies. Overall, our results suggest that the G-SIB reforms have helped to mitigate moral hazard problems associated with systemically important banks, while the consequences for the real economy have been limited.

Using loan‐level data from Germany, we investigate how the introduction of model‐based capital regulation affected banks' ability to absorb shocks. The objective of this regulation was to enhance financial stability by making capital requirements responsive to asset risk. Our evidence suggests that banks “optimized” model‐based regulation to lower their capital requirements. Banks systematically underreported risk, with underreporting more pronounced for banks with higher gains from it. Moreover, large banks benefitted from the regulation at the expense of smaller banks. Overall, our results suggest that sophisticated rules may have undesired effects if strategic misbehavior is difficult to detect.

We use a quasi‐experimental research design to examine the effect of model‐based capital regulation on the procyclicality of bank lending and firms' access to funds. In response to an exogenous shock to credit risk in the German economy, capital charges for loans under model‐based regulation increased by 0.5 percentage points. As a consequence, banks reduced the amount of these loans by 2.1 to 3.9 percentage points more than for loans under the traditional approach with fixed capital charges. We find an even stronger effect when we examine aggregate firm borrowing, suggesting that microprudential capital regulation can have sizeable real effects.

This paper investigates both the magnitude and the drivers of bank window dressing behavior in euro-denominated repo markets. Using a confidential transaction-level data set, our analysis illustrates that banks engineer an economically sizeable contraction in their repo transactions around regulatory reporting dates. We establish a causal link between these reductions and banks’ incentives to window dress and document the role of the leverage ratio and the G-SIB framework as the most relevant drivers of window dressing behavior. Our findings suggest that regulatory action is warranted to limit banks’ ability to window dress.