The Market Impact of Systemic Risk Capital Surcharges

This paper tests whether an increase or decrease of the capital surcharge for being a global systemically important bank (G-SIB) envisaged by regulators has an impact on the CDS prices of these banks. We find evidence that the CDS spreads of a G-SIB bank increase (decrease) after the announcement of a higher (lower) capital surcharge. However, this effect is temporary, as the mean CDS spreads revert to pre-announcement level, dropping sharply after the initial rise. Our analysis contributes to the debate on whether being designated as a G-SIB bank necessarily leads to implicit "too-big-to-fail" subsidies. The findings imply that the investors immediately update their beliefs on the systemic risk of the bank after the bucket reallocation announcement and temporarily demand more hedging against systemic risk.