How does capital buffer affect bank risk-taking? New evidence from China using quantile regression

We present evidence of nonlinearity and heterogeneity relation between capital buffer and risk-taking for the Chinese banking system. We use quantile regression methods on a data set of 135 Chinese banks during 2004-2017. Our results suggest that bank capital buffer has a robust U-shaped association with bank risk-taking. This effect is more significant for banks that at the upper tail of risk-taking distribution. Moreover, we demonstrate for the first time that the turning point of capital buffer decreases throughout the risk-taking distribution. These findings offer important policy implications that continuously increasing bank capital requirement does not continuously lead to lower risk-taking, instead, requiring banks to build up too much capital buffer is more likely to result in greater risk-taking for high-risk banks.