Five Essays on Bank Regulation

Abstract

The story of the financial crisis of 2007-08 is also a story of bank regulation. Commentators from academia and policy institutions have identified an inappropriate regulation of banks and capital markets as one of the main factors that contributed to the transformation of the U.S. subprime crisis into the global financial crisis with all its devastating consequences. Clearly, the regulation of banks and capital markets is one of the most important issues in today's post-crisis world. The present work contains five essays that contribute to the literature on bank regulation. The first three chapters deal with the effects of model-based, risk-weighted capital regulation as specified in the Basel II / Basel III regulatory framework. In Chapter 4, we examine how political factors affect bailout decisions in the German savings bank sector. Chapter 5 uses a panel of 26 countries and investigates how the removal of entry barriers for foreign banks affects economic outcomes, and how it interacts with the efficiency of the domestic banking sector at the time of liberalization.