The Ministry of Finance has proposed a temporary capital requirement (risk weight floor) for commercial real estate (CRE) exposures in Norway, applicable to the largest banks. CRE is the sector where banks have historically incurred the largest losses during crises. Since CRE loan losses are low...

Operating costs in the Norwegian banking sector have been reduced considerably in recent decades, both as a share of income and assets. This has increased banks' resilience to increased losses and reduced the risk of crises. In this article, I analyse how costs have been reduced and the main...

The banking literature contains only a handful of studies of how bank revenues vary over the business cycle, and nearly all of these studies look exclusively on the net interest margin. The general conclusion has been that the margin tends to increase during recessions and decrease during booms....

This paper analyses how the introduction of the IRB approach may have affected banks' lending to enterprises, lending margins and portfolio quality in Norway. Our results show that the IRB banks' lending margins decreased compared with the standardised approach banks following the introduction...

We use unique data on banks' private risk assessments of corporate borrowers to quantify how competition among banks affect the risk sensitivity of interest rates in the Norwegian credit market. We show that an increase in competition makes corporate lending rates less sensitive to banks' own...

We use unique relationship-level data which includes banks’ private risk assessments of corporate borrowers to quantify how competition among banks a ects the risk sensitivity of interest rates in the Norwegian corporate credit market. We show that an increase in competition makes corporate...

The EU plans to revise the capital adequacy rules for banks in 2025. Regulatory amendments will be introduced in Norway through the EEA Agreement. Our results show that the regulatory amendments can significantly reduce the capital requirement for small and medium-sized banks (SA banks). This...