The spillover effects of prudential regulation on banking competition

European supervisors aggressively requested more capital at large banks. That may cut credit to the economy. We confirm that especially larger banks cut loans while less-significant banks partly offset that credit drop. Moreover, we identify nasty spillovers from that interaction. Specifically, larger banks’ deleveraging was associated with significant portfolio worsening for mid-sized banks. We conjecture that while small banks’ loan expansion was somewhat shielded by superior soft-information-based technologies, medium-sized banks were fully exposed to lending to bad borrowers as they boosted loans by relying on credit scoring and Internal Rating Based models. That is proving tricky through the prolonged European dip.