Optimal Volatility, Covenants and Cost of Capital Under Basel III Bail-in

This paper investigates three consequences of the new financial regulation: the agency costs, the monitoring costs and the effect on banks’ cost of capital. For the first, the shareholders’ behaviour is analysed as a trade-off between the value of the bank and its volatility by using an indifference curve model of the bank’s choice of optimal risk. While the first-best optimal risk maximises the value of the bank, the shareholders select suboptimally high risks under bail-in structures. This leads to both the wealth transfer and the value destruction agency costs. For the second, as a result of these consequences of the DAPR (Deviation from the Absolute Priority Rule) the bondholders are forced to closely monitor the bank behaviour. Requiring higher rate of return for higher risk, reflecting the costs of monitoring, is shown to alleviate the agency problems. Different types of covenants are proposed as an efficient way of implementing this solution. For the third, the impact of the new bail-in structure and the monitoring costs on the WACC of 16 largest European banks is estimated, and is shown to increase the cost of capital by between 75% and 110%.