We use a 2013 Norwegian policy reform to study how banks react to higher capital requirements and how these adjustments transmit to the real economy. Using bank balance sheet data, we document that banks raise capital ratios by reducing risk-weighted assets. Most of the reduction in risk-weighted assets is accounted for by a reduction in average risk weights. Consistent with this reduction in risk, we document a substantial decline in credit supply to the corporate sector relative to the household sector. We also show that banks react to higher requirements by increasing interest rates, consistent with the reduction in corporate credit growth being supply driven. Using administrative loan level tax data, we document a reduction in lending on the firm level. This is robust to controlling for firm fixed effects, thereby accounting for potential firm-bank matching. Finally, we find that the reduction in bank lending has a negative impact on firm employment growth and that this effect is driven by small firms.

We study dividend payouts when banks face coordination-based rollover crises. Banks in the model can use dividends to both risk shift and signal their available liquidity to short-term lenders, thus, influencing the lenders’ actions. In the unique equilibrium both channels induce banks to pay higher dividends than in the absence of a rollover crisis. In our model banks exert an informational externality on other banks via the inferences and actions of lenders. Optimal dividend regulation that corrects this externality and promote financial stability includes a binding cap on dividends. We also discuss testable implications of our theory.

We show that banks cross-sell future deposits and loans to existing household depositors. A bank is 20-percentage-points more likely to sell a loan to an existing depositor than to an otherwise comparable household. Existing depositors pay a premium when borrowing, and we find no indication that banks obtain an informational advantage on such borrowers, suggesting that the cross-selling is driven more by demand than by supply complementarities. These demand complementarities are in turn driven more by stickiness rather than by unobserved persistent preferences. Finally, banks internalize future cross-selling potential when setting deposit rates.

This paper investigates how balance sheet opacity affects banks’ risk-taking behavior. We measure bank balance sheet opacity according to two metrics: the ratio of available-for-sale (AFS) securities and the ratio of off-balance sheet items. We show that balance sheet opacity is positively correlated with realized bank risk. Specifically, banks with more AFS securities have lower realized risk, while banks with more off-balance sheet items have higher realized risk. The correlation between opacity and risk depends on both macroeconomic variables and bank characteristics. The positive relationship between bank opacity and bank risk is weaker for better capitalized banks and banks that are subject to more market discipline. The relationship is also weaker during periods of favorable market conditions. Motivated by this analysis, we then investigate how regulation affects bank opacity. We show that higher capital requirements reduce bank opacity and bank risk through a portfolio rebalancing channel.

We investigate the bank lending channel of negative nominal policy rates from an empirical and theoretical perspective. For the empirical results, we rely on Swedish data, including daily bank-level lending rates. We find that retail household deposit rates are subject to a lower bound (DLB). Empirically, once the DLB is met, the pass-through to mortgage lending rates and credit volumes is substantially lower and bank equity values decline in response to further policy rate cuts. We construct a banking sector model and use our estimate of the pass-through of negative policy rates to lending rates as an identified moment to parameterize the model and assess the impact of negative policy rates in general equilibrium. Using the theoretical framework, we derive a sufficient statistic for when negative policy rates are expansionary and when they are not.

We use the EBA capital exercise of 2011 as a quasinatural experiment to investigate how capital requirements affect various measures of bank solvency risk. We show that, while regulatory measures of solvency improve, nonregulatory measures indicate a deterioration in bank solvency in response to higher capital requirements. The decline in bank solvency is driven by a permanent reduction in banks’ market value of equity. This finding is consistent with a reduction in bank profitability, rather than a repricing of bank equity due to a reduction of implicit and explicit too-big-too-fail guarantees. We then discuss alternative policies to improve bank solvency.

We explore the impact of low and negative monetary policy rates in core world economies on bank lending in four small open economies – Canada, Chile, the Czech Republic and Norway – using confidential bank-level data. We show that the impact on lending in these small open economies depends on the interest rate level in the core. During normal times, monetary policy cuts in the core can reduce credit supply in small open economies. In contrast, when interest rates in the core are low, further expansionary monetary policy increases lending in small open economies, consistent with an international bank lending channel. These results have important policy implications, suggesting that central banks in small open economies should watch for the impact of potential regime switches in core economies’ monetary policy when rates shift to and from the very low end of the distribution.