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The paper inspects the credit impact of policy instruments that are commonly applied to contain systemic risk. It employs detailed information on the use of capital-based, borrowerbased and liquidity-based instruments in 28 European Union countries in 1995-2017 and a macroeconomic panel setup. The paper finds a significant impact of capital buffers, profit distribution restrictions, specific and general loan-loss provisioning regulations, sectoral risk weights and exposure limits, borrower-based measures, caps on long-term maturity and exchange rate mismatch, and asset-based capital requirements on credit to the non-financial private sector. Furthermore, the business cycle and monetary policy influence the effectiveness of most of the macroprudential instruments. Therein, capital buffers and sectoral risk weights act countercyclically irrespectively of the prevailing monetary policy stance, while a far richer set of policy instruments can act countercyclically in combination with the appropriate monetary policy stance.

How do capital and liquidity buffers affect the evolution of bank loans in periods of financial and economic distress? To answer this question we study the responses of 219 individual banks to aggregate demand, standard and unconventional monetary policy shocks in the euro area between 2007 and 2015. Banks' responses are derived from a factor-augmented VAR, which relates macroeconomic aggregates to individual bank balance sheet items and interest rates. We find that banks with high capital and liquidity buffers show a more muted response in their lending to adverse real economy shocks. Capital and liquidity buffers also affect bank responses to monetary policy shocks. High bank capitalisation reduces the degree to which banks increase the average duration of loans to the non-financial corporate sector, while high bank liquidity strengthens the positive response to policy easing of both long- and short-term loans to the non-financial corporate sector. The latter findings substantiate the relevance of interactions between prudential controls and monetary policy.

This paper formulates a dynamic model of a bank exposed to both credit and liquidity risk, which can resolve financial distress in three costly forms: fire sales, bond issuance and equity issuance. We use the model to analyze the impact of capital regulation, liquidity requirements and taxation on banks’ optimal policies and metrics of efficiency of intermediation and social value. We obtain three main results. First, mild capital requirements increase bank lending, bank efficiency and social value relative to an unregulated bank, but these benefits turn into costs if capital requirements are too stringent. Second, liquidity requirements reduce bank lending, efficiency and social value significantly, they nullify the benefits of mild capital requirements, and their private and social costs increase monotonically with their stringency. Third, increases in corporate income and bank liabilities taxes reduce bank lending, bank efficiency and social value, with tax receipts increasing with the former but decreasing with the latter. Moreover, the effects of an increase in both forms of taxation are dampened if they are jointly implemented with increases in capital and liquidity requirements.

This paper provides a framework for modeling the risk-taking channel of monetary policy, the mechanism how financial intermediaries' incentives for liquidity transformation are affected by the central bank's reaction to financial crisis. Anticipating central bank's reaction to liquidity stress gives banks incentives to invest in excessive liquidity transformation, triggering an 'interest rate trap' - the economy will remain stuck in a long lasting period of sub-optimal, low interest rate equilibrium. We demonstrate that interest rate policy as financial stabilizer is dynamically inconsistent, and the constraint efficient outcome can be implemented by imposing ex ante liquidity requirements.

This paper discusses liquidity regulation when short-term funding enables credit growth but generates negative systemic risk externalities. It focuses on the relative merit of price versus quantity rules, showing how they target different incentives for risk creation. When banks differ in credit opportunities, a Pigovian tax on short-term funding is efficient in containing risk and preserving credit quality, while quantity-based funding ratios are distorsionary. Liquidity buffers are either fully ineffective or similar to a Pigovian tax with deadweight costs. Critically, they may be least binding when excess credit incentives are strongest. When banks differ instead mostly in gambling incentives (due to low charter value or overconfidence), excess credit and liquidity risk are best controlled with net funding ratios. Taxes on short-term funding emerge again as efficient when capital or liquidity ratios keep risk shifting incentives under control. In general, an optimal policy should involve both types of tools.

Using the model of Rochet and Vives (2004), this note shows that a prudential regulator can in general not mitigate a bank’s failure risk solely by means of liquidity requirements. However, their effectiveness can be restored if, in addition, minimum capital requirements are met. This provides a rationale for capital requirements beyond the commonly envoked reasoning that they are to be used to control the riskiness of banks’ asset portfolios.

Using the model of Rochet and Vives (2004), this note shows that a prudential regulator can in general not mitigate a bank's failure risk solely by means of liquidity requirements. However, their effectiveness can be restored if, in addition, minimum capital requirements are met. This provides a rationale for capital requirements beyond the commonly envoked reasoning that they are to be used to control the riskiness of banks' asset portfolios.