This study investigates whether regulations have an independent effect on bank risk-taking or whether their effect is channeled through the market power possessed by banks. Given a well-established set of theoretical priors, the regulations considered are capital requirements, restrictions on bank activities and official supervisory power. We use data from the Central and Eastern European banking sectors over the period 1998-2005. The empirical results suggest that banks with market power tend to take on lower credit risk and have a lower probability of default. Capital requirements reduce risk in general, but for banks with market power this effect significantly weakens. Higher activity restrictions in combination with more market power reduce both credit risk and the risk of default, while official supervisory power has only a direct impact on bank risk.

In a recent line of research the low interest-rate environment of the early to mid 2000s is viewed as an element that triggered increased risk-taking appetite of banks in search for yield. This paper uses approximately 18,000 annual observations on euro area banks over the period [2001][2002][2003][2004][2005][2006][2007][2008] and presents strong empirical evidence that low interest rates indeed increase bank risk-taking substantially. This result is robust across a number of different specifications that account, inter alia, for the potential endogeneity of interest rates and/or the dynamics of bank risk. Notably, among the banks of the large euro area countries this effect is less pronounced for French institutions, which held on average a relatively low level of risk assets. Finally, the distributional effects of interest rates on bank risk-taking due to individual bank characteristics reveal that the impact of interest rates on risk assets is diminished for banks with higher equity capital and is amplified for banks with higher off-balance sheet items.

The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between banking sector reform and bank performance -measured in terms of efficiency, total factor productivity growth and net interest margin -accounting for the effects through competition and bank risk-taking. To this end, we develop an empirical model of bank performance and draw on recent econometric advances to consistently estimate it. The model is applied to bank panel data from ten newly acceded EU countries. The results indicate that both banking sector reform and competition exert a positive impact on bank efficiency, while the effect of reform on total factor productivity growth is significant only toward the end of the reform process. Finally, the effect of capital and credit risk on bank performance is in most cases negative, while it seems that higher liquid assets reduce the efficiency and productivity of banks.

In this paper we estimate the degree of market power at the bank-level for 84 banking systems worldwide. Subsequently, we analyze the sources of bank competition, placing emphasis on the impact of financial reform and the quality of institutions. We find that financial liberalization policies reduce the market power of banks in developed countries with advanced politico-institutional milieus. In contrast, banking competition does not improve at the same pace in countries with weaker institutions and a lower level of economic development. The results hold across a wide array of identification tests and estimation methods. The main policy implication to be drawn is that a certain level of institutional maturity is a precondition for the success of reforms aimed at enhancing competition and efficiency of banking markets.JEL Classifications: P4; G2 ; L1 ; C1

This paper investigates the role of banking supervision in controlling bank risk. Banking supervision is measured in terms of enforcement outputs (i.e., on-site audits and sanctions).Our results show an inverted U-shaped relationship between on-site audits and bank risk, while the relationship between sanctions and risk appears to be linear and negative. We also consider the combined effect of effective supervision and banking regulation (in the form of capital and market discipline requirements) on bank risk. We find that effective supervision and market discipline requirements are important and complementary mechanisms in reducing bank fragility. This is in contrast to capital requirements, which prove to be rather futile in controlling bank risk, even when supplemented with a higher volume of on-site audits and sanctions.JEL Classifications: G21; G32; G38