The empirics of banking regulation

Abstract

This paper empirically assesses whether banking regulation is effective at preventing banking crises. We use a monthly index of banking system fragility, which captures almost every source of risk in the banking system, to estimate the effect of regulatory measures (entry restriction, reserve requirement, deposit insurance, and capital adequacy requirement) on banking stability in the context of a Markov-switching model. Our methodology is less prone to selection and simultaneity bias which are common in this type of study. We apply this method to the Indonesian banking system, which has been subject to several regulatory changes over the last couple of decades, and at the same time, has experienced a severe systemic crisis. We draw the following findings from this research : (i) entry restriction reduces crisis duration as well as the probability of such an occurrence; (ii) larger reserve requirements reduce crisis duration, but increase banking instability; (iii) deposit insurance increases banking system stability and reduces crisis duration; (vi) capital adequacy requirement improves stability and reduces the expected duration of banking crises. Finally, we find that previous studies present a negative simultaneity bias for deposit insurance and a negative selection bias for capital adequacy requirement.