This policy brief assesses the implications of Basel II for bank regulatory compliance costs. In spite of widespread complaints by bankers about the costs of complying with Basel II rules, the academic literature has given surprisingly little attention to quantifying these costs. The brief...

Building on the literature emphasizing banks' monitoring functions, recent contributions to the literature examining the effects of capital regulation have focused attention on the influences of capital requirements on bank incentives to monitor loans for moral hazard risks. Empirical evidence...

This paper reviews academic studies of bank capital regulation in an effort to evaluate the intellectual foundation for the imposition of the Basel I and Basel II systems of risk-based capital requirements. The theoretical literature yields general agreement about the immediate effects of...