The purpose of this paper is to analyze empirically the behavior of expected loan loss provisions during the economic cycle. The provisioning rules under IFRS require the creation of reserves to cover expected credit losses, were anticipated to act countercyclically, and thus replaced the rules under IAS 39, which are widely presumed to have a procyclical impact. Observing the dynamics of the economic cycle during the economic downturn resulting from the COVID restrictions, a panel regression was performed to test the hypothesis that loan loss provisioning rules under IFRS 9 have a procyclical impact. The hypothesis was not rejected on the basis of a sample of the member countries of the European Union for the period of 1Q 2015 -3Q 2020. Since the conclusions about procyclicality of loan loss provisions under IFRS 9 might be sensitive to the choice of models applied by the banks or to the assumptions applied to forwardlooking information used in the models, there are certain areas that supervisory and regulatory authorities might look into to increase the quality of ECL models and their predictive power and help to eliminate potential triggers of procyclicality.

The aim of this study is to provide an overview of the principles of IFRS 9 implementation and to analyse its impact on the Czech banking sector. Unlike the previous IAS 39 standard, valid until the end of 2017, the new accounting rules require banks to estimate forward-looking expected credit losses (ECL) while considering relevant exposure level information as well as available macroeconomic predictions. Due to the increased complexity of the ECL models and changing macroeconomic expectations, we hypothesize that the new standard leads to increased volatility of loan loss allowances. This hypothesis is empirically tested and more or less confirmed by an analysis of the quarterly flows of allowances for a sample of large Czech banks from the years 2016-2017 under IAS 39 and from 2018-2019 under IFRS 9.

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