The financial crisis prompted widespread interest in developing a better understanding of how capital regulation drives bank behavior. This paper uses a unique, comprehensive database of regulatory capital requirements on all UK banks to examine their effects on capital, lending and balance sheet management behavior. We find that capital requirements that include firm-specific, time-varying add-ons set by supervisors affect banks’ desired capital ratios and that resulting adjustments to capital and lending depend on the gap between actual and target ratios. We use these results to measure the effects of a capital regime that includes features similar to those embedded in the UK framework. Our results suggest that countercyclical capital requirements may be less effective in slowing credit activity when banks can readily satisfy them with lower-quality (lower-costing) capital elements versus higher-quality common equity. Given the size of the UK banking sector and the global nature of many of the largest institutions in the UK banking sector, the results have implications for the ongoing debate surrounding the design and calibration of international capital standards.

We examine how bank-specific capital requirements affect banks’ capital ratios and balance sheet composition over the period 1989-2013. We find that higher requirements, even when not binding in a regulatory sense, result in higher bank capital ratios, achieved by a combination of asset contraction, risk reduction and capital raising strategies. We find that after the 2007-09 financial crisis, banks place greater emphasis on raising capital, but that they continue to focus first on raising lower-quality capital. Our results have implications for evaluating the efficacy of bank-specific capital requirements as a policy tool to influence bank balance sheet behavior and resilience.