This paper investigates whether European banks have capital targets and how deviations from the target impact their equity composition and activity mix. Using quarterly data for a sample of large European banks between 2004 and 2011, we show that there are notable asymmetries in banks' reactions...

We develop a Mixed-Cross-Section Global Vector Autoregressive (MCS-GVAR) model for the 28 EU economies and a sample of individual banking groups to study the propagation of bank capital shocks to the economy. We conduct various simulations with the model to assess how capital ratio shocks...

The paper shows that mispriced deposit insurance and capital regulation were of second order importance in determining the capital structure of large U.S. and European banks during 1991 to 2004. Instead, standard cross-sectional determinants of non-financial firms' leverage carry over to banks,...

The paper shows that mispriced deposit insurance and capital regulation were of second order importance in determining the capital structure of large U.S. and European banks during 1991 to 2004. Instead, standard cross-sectional determinants of non-financial firms' leverage carry over to banks,...

We study the impact of higher capital requirements on banks' balance sheets and its transmission to the real economy. The 2011 EBA capital exercise is an almost ideal quasi-natural experiment to identify this impact with a difference-in-differences matching estimator. We find that treated banks...