This paper seeks to understand the interplay between banks, bank regulation, sovereign default risk and central bank guarantees in a monetary union. I assume that banks can use sovereign bonds for repurchase agreements with a common central bank, and that their sovereign partially backs up any losses, should the banks not be able to repurchase the bonds. I argue that regulators in risky countri...

We study optimal bank regulation in an economy with aggregate uncertainty. Bank liabilities are used as “money” and hence earn lower returns than equity. In laissez faire equilibrium, banks maximize market value, trading off the funding advantage of debt against the risk of costly default. The capital structure is not socially optimal because external costs of distress are not internalized by t...

Basel III introduces the first global framework for bank liquidity regulation. As monetary policy typically involves targeting the interest rate on interbank loans of the most liquid asset – central bank reserves – it is important to understand how this new requirement will impact the efficacy of current operational frameworks. We extend a standard model of monetary policy implementation in a c...

This paper examines the optimal design of capital and liquidity regulations under fire sale externalities. The lack of complementary liquidity ratio requirements harms the purpose of capital adequacy requirements by yielding not only inefficiently low risky investment but also more severe financial crises. When capital is regulated but liquidity is not, banks still keep liquid assets for micro-...

Regulatory constraints on bank leverage have been at the center of many policy discussions recently. One important question to emerge from these discussions has been whether these regulations should be time-dependent and how they would interact with the business cycle. We analyze this question using a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with banks and bank capital. In the model, bank c...

In this paper, I compare three models, or systems, of debt finance: (i) the bank system, (ii) the capital market system, and (iii) the long-term credit bank system. This paper puts particular emphasis on the cost of regulation and the cost of enforcing regulation. This paper argues that these costs are important determinants when any given jurisdiction chooses a system for debt finance. Section...

We examine the optimal design of and interaction between capital and liquidity regulations. Banks, not internalizing fire sale externalities, overinvest in risky assets and underinvest in liquid assets in the competitive equilibrium. Capital requirements can alleviate the inefficiency, but banks respond by decreasing their liquidity ratios. When capital requirements are the only available tool,...

The Financial Services Authority, anticipating the movement towards digital (bank 5.0), issued Regulation no. 12/POJK.03/2021 concerning Commercial Banks. However, its coverage is limited. It covers only rules on how to establish and manage branches of existing banks. Not yet available are special arrangements for establishment commercial banks or neo-banks. This paper discusses possibility est...