The Impact of Capital Regulation on Bank Capital and Risk Decision. Evidence for European Global Systemically Important Banks

Large banks were largely blamed for the recent financial crisis, due to their roles in the propagation of the crisis. Partly due to the unprecedented amount of public funds disbursed to rescue the fail banks to avert the total breakdown of the global financial system and the resultant moral hazard of their bailout. Policymakers and regulators have significantly increased bank regulations after the crisis to rein-in some of the “excesses” of the banks that cause to the financial crisis. Particularly, Basel III capital regulation came into existence largely to strengthening the capital framework for banks and increases the loss absorbency for the so-called too big to fail banks. This study investigates the impact of capital regulation on the capital and risk portfolio behaviour of European large and complex banks during the period 2009–2014. By using a modified version of the structural equation model developed by Shrieves and Dahl (1992) to estimate the effect of capital regulation on banks’ capital and risk portfolios decisions. The findings of our model estimation indicate that regulation has a significant impact on changes in bank capital. We, however, do not find any significant evidence of the impact of regulation on bank risk portfolio decisions. Model estimation results also show that there is a significant negative relationship between changes in bank capital level and changes in risk portfolio level and vice versa.