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Journal of Financial Stability Vol. 9 No. 3 2013

Multiple bank regulators and risk taking

Itai Agur

International Monetary Fund – Singapore Regional Training Institute, 10 Shenton Way, MAS Building # 14-03, Singapore 079117, Singapore

Abstract

The potential for banks to arbitrage between regulators exists both in the US, with its multiple federal banking regulators, and in Europe, due to multinational banking. This paper models multiple regulators that have an agency bias, which can give rise to a “race to the bottom”. The model is used to analyze the interaction between the regulatory equilibrium and several salient pre-crisis features: rising bank leverage; wholesale funding with asymmetric information; and increasing supervisional costs to disentangling bank asset exposures. Each of these raises bank risk taking on its own, but regulatory competition is shown to be an amplification mechanism.

DOI
10.1016/j.jfs.2013.04.003
Volume
9
Issue
3
Pages
259-268
Language
en
Sources
bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

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