Manipulation of basel risk weights: revising the Czech banking sector

This thesis provides the empirical analysis of the second Basel regulatory framework implementation in Czech banks together with the economic performance inspection of the Czech banking sector. With Basel II, banks face the possibility to implement internal models to calculate capital adequacy related to bank's risk exposure. This possibility opens a discussion of its economic effect, transparency and potential misuse of the internal models. The empirical part of this thesis examines how the profitability and the reported riskiness change with internal models implementation. Furthermore, the role of cost efficiency to bank's profitability and risk adequacy ratio is evaluated. The panel data analysis of all Czech banks over a period 2006 to 2012 demonstrates that internal models for capital adequacy calculation increase bank's profitability together with a decrease of the reported riskiness measured by risk weighted assets. Moreover, the cost efficiency has proven to be a significant indicator of both profitability and capital adequacy ratio.