G28 - Financial Institutions and Services: Government Policy and RegulationReturn

We contribute to literature on banks´ strategies to increasing capital requirements in the period of 2017-2021. We analyze a sample of 85 European banks and differentiate between subgroups according to bank's size, capitalization and riskiness. We examine their responses to higher capital requirements following the issuance of finalized Basel III reforms and increased regulatory and supervisory scrutiny after the COVID-19 outbreak. We found evidence that banks´ adjustments in the direction of higher capital ratio were more pronounced and faster in the COVID-19 period, and that they depended on banks´ specific characteristics and positions. Identified variances between banks and periods resulted mainly from different treatment of risk on banks' books. In particular, higher capitalization and lower risk profile enabled banks to take on the risk regardless of period, while banks with increased risk rather limited their balance sheets to manage their capital ratios.

This research introduces a novel pairs trading strategy based on copulas for cointegrated pairs of cryptocurrencies. To identify the most suitable pairs, the study employs linear and non-linear cointegration tests along with a correlation coefficient measure and fits different copula families to generate trading signals formulated from a reference asset for analyzing the mispricing index. The strategy's performance is then evaluated by conducting back-testing for various triggers of opening positions, assessing its returns and risks. The findings indicate that the proposed method outperforms buy-and-hold trading strategies in terms of both profitability and risk-adjusted returns.

In this paper, we examine the impact of the supervision as a monitoring activity and regulatory scrutiny on the performance and riskiness of the financial institutions in countries of Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, whose banking sectors are characterized by foreign-bank dominated systems. For a dataset of 450 banks from 20 economies of the region, we use statistics from the World Bank-Bank Regulation and Supervisory Survey to construct the measures of the supervision activities, capital regulation stringency and supervisory power. We find that a higher intensity of supervision monitoring activities, especially by the centralized form of supervision, contributes to the decline of the bank's riskiness in case of larger banks while not affecting their economic performance. The regulatory power and stringency indicate a positive effect on the risk-adjusted performance for capital constrained banks, but moderately decrease the economic benefit for larger banks. The findings highlight the potential area of attention for regulators and policymakers and thus, contribute to the designing of effective supervision mechanism in the region.

Rating transition matrices have become a workhorse of the IFRS 9 expected credit loss and ICAAP stress test modelling. The standard method to stress a through-the-cycle transition matrix is based on a single factor Gaussian model with a correlation parameter that is usually estimated on the level of a product pool. The goal of the paper is to generalize the model allowing for more general distributional assumptions and to test empirically the sensitivity of the results with respect to these assumptions and different possible approaches to the correlation parameter estimation. We are not aware of any such empirical study in the literature. The results show that this dependence is very strong with the standard approach underestimating the results, as we argue, of a more precise calculation many times. Therefore, there is a significant model risk that needs to be taken into account in ICAAP/IFRS 9 implementation and dealt with in further research.