Empirical evidence of aggregate credit supply by South African banks since the introduction of international risk based capital regulation

Neethling, Sean Brett

Empirical evidence of aggregate credit supply by South African banks since the introduction of international risk based capital regulation

Master Thesis

2014

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

Department of Finance and Tax

Faculty

Faculty of Commerce

Abstract

This paper reviews the empirical evidence of how South African banks have changed credit supply since the introduction of risk based capital regulation through the Basel Accords. The primary objective is to analyse empirical trends in on-balance sheet lending between 1994 and 2013 and to establish whether the propensity for banks to extend credit at the aggregate industry level can be partly attributed to the increased regulatory requirements of target capital adequacy ratios or is more dependent on other demand and supply side variables. The extent to which compliance with regulated capital reforms has been satisfied by contracting credit supply, increasing qualifying capital or changing the composition of on-balance sheet lending portfolios through substituting between risk weighted assets is analysed. Furthermore, the risk weighted assets component of capital adequacy is reviewed to more critically understand risk taking and arbitrage in both retail and commercial lending portfolios over the full observation period. A vector auto regression (VAR) model is used to test the dependency of bank lending on both bank specific and macroeconomic variables and to quantify their individual effects at the aggregate industry level.

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Includes bibliographical references.

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