Jon Danielsson discusses the use of capital ratios and macroprudential regulation and describes the limitations of each policy: How banks can inflate capital ratios, how capital requirements fail to reduce the risk of aggregate shocks and how Basel III regulations burden smaller banks relative...

Risk based regulation has emerged as the primary ingredient in the Basel-II proposals, where a bank capital is to become a direct funtion of a bank's riskiness. While the notion that bank capital be risk sensitive is intuitively appealing, the actual implementation, in the form of Basel-II,...

We investigate the effects of financial risk cycles on business cycles, using a panel spanning 73 countries since 1900. Agents use a Bayesian learning model to form their beliefs on risk. We construct a proxy of these beliefs and show that perceived low risk encourages risk-taking, augmenting...