Monetary policy, bank leverage, and financial stability

This paper shows that with limited liability banks lever up excessively to finance new loans. Lower monetary policy rates can worsen or reduce these incentives depending on the size of the shock when equity financing is ruled out. When this constrained is relaxed but the bank faces costly dividend adjustment, lower monetary policy rates always worsen risk-taking incentives and the effect is persistent. The reason is that costly dividend adjustment lowers the opportunity cost of lending. In this model, capital requirements are closer to the source of the distortion and thus work better than loan-to-value caps in reducing excessive risk taking. (C) 2014 International Monetary Fund. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.