Half as many cheers – The multiplier reviewed

The financial industry puts the Basle Committee under strain to align regulatory capital with economic capital. This could be reached by allowing more flexibility in the choice of risk measure for regulatory reporting. Markus Leippold and Paolo Vanini show that if banks could use the theoretically more sound risk measure of Expected Shortfall, the three cheers of Stahl (1997) would be reduced to exactly half as many cheers. This would substantially decrease the regulatory capital in most cases.