Banking procyclicality: cross country evidence

The stylized fact of co-movement of lending and economic activity has been widely interpreted as evidence of a destabilizing feedback mechanism between the banking and real sectors, suggesting the special role of credit supply in amplifying financial and macroeconomic instability. Indeed, this “procyclicality” view significantly influences bank regulations internationally. Under the Basel III, the countercyclical capital buffer is exclusively designed to dampen the volatility of credit supply over the business cycle. The strong co-movement of lending and economic activity, however, is insufficient to confirm the existence of the procyclicality, given that both demand and supply of loans decline during economic downturns. If loan supply does not play a causal role, then any measure to strengthen lending capacity of banks would be ineffective in addressing this procyclicality issue. The literature, however, provides limited, otherwise inexistent, cross-country evidence to answer these fundamental questions. This research gap calls into question the sufficiency of international evidence to assess the effectiveness of the new capital measure, and more broadly, the regulatory reform. This cross-country econometric study covering 39 economies for the period 1990– 2009 examines these fundamental issues in detail. There are three main findings and policy implications. For banking stability, a significant procyclical pattern of loan supply exists, and such pattern is negatively associated with bank capital. These findings together support the view that the countercyclical capital buffers of Basel III could be effective tools for dampening loan volatility over the business cycle. For the regulatory reform, there is prevalent evidence that capital and liquidity are determinants of loan supply. This finding bears out the main Basel III argument that stronger capital and liquidity could strengthen the resilience of the global banking sector to macroeconomic shocks. For macroeconomic stability, empirical findings suggest a moderate macroeconomic effect of loan supply, particularly for developed economies. However, the finding does not imply a small impact of banking instability on the real sector. In fact, banking crises are estimated to have a larger independent negative effect on economic growth after controlling for the macroeconomic effect through impacts of banking crises on loan supply. There are two main policy implications of these findings. First, the main channel through which stronger capital and liquidity of banks help reduce macroeconomic instability would have an impact on reducing the likelihood of the occurrence of a banking crisis. Second, during non-crisis periods, bank regulations aiming at smoothing loan supply may have a relatively moderate impact on reducing macroeconomic instability. For policy to address banking procyclicality, the results show that aside from higher quantitative capital and liquidity requirements, more stringent definitions of capital could dampen loan supply procyclicality, which speaks in favor of recent policy initiatives to strengthen the quality of regulatory capital. More stringent bank regulations are also found to reduce loan supply procyclicality in countries with deposit insurance schemes. To reduce the propagations of loan supply shocks to the real sector, policy to improve the breadth of the stock market and the size of the domestic bond market would be useful.published_or_final_versionEconomics and FinanceDoctoralDoctor of Philosoph