The Impact of Bank Regulation on Bank Performance: A Novel Analysis of the Pre-Covid Era with Cross-Country Evidence

Abstract

Banks play a pivotal role in all economies by bringing balance to the economic flows of surplus and deficit. As a result of this, they are heavily regulated by national and globally accepted regulations such as the Basel III Accord. This research aims to ascertain the impact of the prudential Basel III regulations on the financial performance of selected listed African banks before the advent of Covid-19. The study used the fixed effects and random effect estimator to fit the static panel data established for the study. A panel of 45 listed banks from six African nations were used, covering the period from 2010 to 2019. The study concludes that the adoption of tighter and higher Basel III regulatory requirements has a double-edged-two-face implication on African banks’ financial performance. This conclusion is based on the findings that the capital adequacy ratio has a positive effect on the financial performance of African banks while the liquidity and minimum capital requirement have a negative effect.