Bank Capital Structure, Regulatory Capital and Securities' Innovations

Financing Innovations and Capital Structure Choices

Bank capital structure and credit decisions

This paper argues that banks must be sufficiently levered to have first-best incentives to make new risky loans. This result, which is at odds with the notion that leverage invariably leads to excessive risk taking, derives from two key premises that focus squarely on the role of banks as informed lenders. First, banks finance projects that they do not own, which implies that they cannot extrac...

Innovations and Venture Capital

This paper develops a theory why innovation often takes place in new rms that depend overproportionally on external nance usually supplied by specialist intermediaries called venture capitalists. It is argued that innovative projects are characterized by two features: uncertainty that is resolved through a learning by doing process and private bene ts for the entrepreneur from running the proje...

Regulating Bank Capital Structure to Control Risk

T he most important recent developments in bank regulation are based on capital requirements. For example, the Basle Accord of 1988 specifies that bank capital must be at least 8 percent of a bank’s risk-weighted assets.1 Also, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act of 1991 (FDICIA) requires regulators to shut down a bank whose capital has dropped below a cutoff level. While ...

Bank Capital and Risk-Taking

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