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In contrast to the 1988 Basel Accord (Basel I), the revised risk-based capital standards (Basel II) propose regulatory capital requirements based on credit ratings. This paper develops a theoretical model to analyze how banks will adjust their low and high credit risk commercial loans under the proposed newer standard. Capital-constrained banks respond to an adverse capital shock by reducing high credit risk loans, while under certain circumstances, low credit risk loans may actually increase. When compared to Basel I, it is shown that high-risk loans are reduced more under Basel II, but whether a bank reduces total lending more under Basel I or under the revised standards depends on a complex interaction of factors.

Recent research suggests that long-term interest rate spreads provide information that can be useful in forecasting inflation, but that the spread between the three-month and six-month Treasury bill rates appears to have little forecasting ability. This paper uses the concepts of unit roots and cointegration to examine the failure of the short-term T-bill spread to forecast inflation. The results suggest that the interest rate spread has little forecasting value because inflation and the interest rate spread exhibit distinctly different time-series properties.

This paper examines the impact that the Prompt Corrective Action (PCA) standards had on bank portfolios following the passage of FDICIA in 1991. To do this, the simultaneous equations model developed by Shrieves and Dahl (1992), and later modified by Jacques and Nigro (1997) to study the impact of risk-based capital, is used to examine how PCA simultaneously influenced bank capital ratios and portfolio risk levels. Unlike prior studies on this topic, by using a simultaneous equations model, the endogeneity of both capital and portfolio risk is explicitly recognized, and as such, the impact of possible changes in bank capital ratios on risk in a bank's portfolio can be examined.