Capital ratios and banking crises in the European Union

Abstract

We assess if capital ratios reduced the occurrence of banking crises in the European Union from 1998 to 2017. We use a Probit model and estimate the effect of two measures: the bank capital to total assets ratio and the bank regulatory capital to Risk Weighted Assets (RWA). We found that both measures affect negatively the probability of crisis. This result is robust to the exclusion of outliers, to the inclusion of various control variables for banking, financial and macroeconomic risks. Finally, we show that while the bank regulatory capital to RWA has always a negative effect on the probability of crisis, the bank capital to total assets ratio is only significant above a threshold, estimated between 10 ​% and 12 ​%.