Bank capital and risk adjustment decision in emerging markets: the case of India

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the association between changes in regulatory capital and risk of Indian commercial banks by using secondary data collected from 'Capitaline Plus' corporate database from 2000 to 2014. Employing a three-stage least-squares technique in a simultaneous equation framework, the study finds that changes in capital and those in risk are negatively associated. The observed results also indicate the speed of adjusting the level of risk is greater than the speed of adjusting the level of capital adequacy ratio, which suggests that Indian banks are maintaining stipulated levels of capital and concentrating more on achieving the target level of risk at a faster rate.