Basel Core Principles and Bank Risk: Does Compliance Matter?

Abstract

This paper studies whether compliance with the Basel Core Principles for effective banking supervision (BCPs) is associated with bank soundness. Using data for over 3,000 banks in 86countries, we find that neither the overall index of BCP compliance nor its individual components are robustly associated with bank risk measured by Z-scores. We also fail to find a relationship between BCP compliance and systemic risk measured by a system-wide Zscore.

Keywords: Bank reforms, Bank regulations, Bank soundness, Bank supervision, Banks, Basel Core Principles, Credit risk, Cross country analysis, Financial risk