Bank Capital and Bank Lending. Evidence from Germany

Abstract or Introduction

This bachelor’s thesis is dealing with the relationship between Capital Ratios and lending behaviour of banks with the focus on the German banks. After the financial crisis in 2008/9, the assets of banks took severe losses and threatened the banks on the brink of bankruptcy. Afterwards the regulation of banks and its capital ratios became stricter. This regulation and requirement have an impact on the lending behaviour of banks and forced them to rethink the construction of their assets due to the maintaining of a regulated capital ratio. There are two different ways on approaching it. The first is by either adjusting their risk-weighted assets or the second is by increasing their levels of regulatory capital. This approaches led to different lending behaviours of the banks because loans are a main component of risk-weighted assets and assets in general. Nowadays there is a debate whether the new regulation is the reason why banks are lending less money than in the past and three scientific papers, which will be reviewed, have different arguments and different perspectives. The goal of this thesis is to take a look on assets, loans and capital ratios of German banks, compare and analyse them throughout the years in order to give an answer on the question whether capital ratios and the requirements have an impact on the lending of these banks. The first step is to give some insights about the definitions of the reviewed bank types in Germany and their business models, different ratios and their structure and how they are connected to the regulatory standard Basel III. Secondly, I will give a literature review and then the thesis will give an examination of a given data set about German banks. I lay my focus on the commercial banks and the so called “Sparkassen” (savings banks in Germany). By working with them, I want to find out a correlation between capital ratios and loan growths and provide a descriptive statistic about my calculations. I will also distinguish between small and large banks and analyse them separately in order to see if their behaviours differ from each other and if we are able to conclude that the size of their assets matters. In the end, the thesis will provide an analysis, which also involves the findings of the papers, of the results I found out and I will see if my analysis and thesis are agreeing with the statements of the papers.