Banks’ regulatory risk tolerance

We employ 68 quarters of data – including from non-public supervisory sources – to study how 17 US and 17 euro-area banks balance the risk of breaching regulatory requirements against the cost of maintaining and speedily restoring “management” buffers. We find that steady-state management buffer targets systematically declined and regulatory risk tolerance (RRT) rose following the Great Financial Crisis, especially at banks experiencing a stronger increase in capital requirements. As a sign that RRT is a conscious choice, banks facing more volatile management buffer shocks set higher management buffer targets. High-RRT banks tend to respond to a depletion of their management buffers by cutting lending, whereas low-RRT banks reduce the riskiness but not the volume of their assets — thus highlighting real-economy effects of capital management strategies. JEL Classification: G21, G28, E51, G31