Being a Good Host: How Important is Ring-Fencing in Bank Prudential Regulation and Supervision

Abstract

Territorial bias or home bias refers to the degree of geographical separation of the local operations of a cross border banking group from its foreign parent bank or affiliates to protect the local operations from cross-border contagion. The purpose of this paper is to measure and rank territorial bias in prudential banking regulation and supervision in 22 European Union (EU) and non-EU countries with financial systems predominantly owned by foreign banks. First, a scoring system is developed to measure territorial bias on an individual country basis (vertical analysis). Second, the results are compared across two peer groups, EU and non-EU (horizontal analysis). I find that territorial bias is present to a varying degree in the prudential supervision and the regulations of the countries surveyed. On average higher territorial bias is observed in the non-EU group. Generally, there is also less dispersion in the EU, which can be explained by a more unified regulatory framework and the efforts to achieve supervisory convergence. Non-EU countries also use a wider array of instruments; typically higher capital ratios, mandatory conversion from systemic branches to subsidiaries, stricter local governance requirements, and liquidity restrictions. This is the first analysis and quantification of territorial bias in bank supervision and regulation.