Legacy asset overhang and incentive to shift risk due to government guarantees can both affect bank capital issuance and lending decisions. We show that such frictions lead to ambiguous predictions on how one should expect a bank to react to a change in capital requirements. One sustained...

Traditionally, regulation of banks has focused on the riskentailed in bank loans. Loans are typically nontradedassets. In recent years, another component of bank assetshas become increasingly important: assets actively tradedin the financial markets.1 These assets form the “tradingbook” of a...