Banking Deregulation and Financial Stability : is it Time to re-regulate in Canada ?

We provide new evidence of a worsening of the risk-return trade-off in Canadian banking. Surging OBS activities have led to increasingly volatile net operating revenues, and might have reduced well-known measures of bank profitability, like return on assets and return on equity. In this context, a natural question arises: should we re-regulate? On this matter, we confirm Calmès(2003) prediction: a maturation process took place after 1997. Using a new approach based on ARCH-M estimation, we find that an additional risk premium has emerged. In this sense, there is no need to re-regulate.