The effectiveness of banking supervision

Abstract

Banking supervision is an essential aspect of modern financial systems, seeking crucially to monitor risk-taking by banks so as to protect depositors, the government safety net and the economy as a whole against systemic bank failure and its consequences. In this context, this paper seeks to explore the relationship between risk indicators for individual banks and the different approaches to banking supervision adopted around the world. This is the first work to make use of the currently available cross section series data on bank supervision from the World Bank to carry out empirical investigations in a panel data framework, gaining all the advantages in increased efficiency and information that comes from estimations combining longer time series and a wide range of countries. We find wide-ranging effects of design features of banking supervision on risk taking which raise important policy issues.