Capital requirements and claims recovery: A new perspective on solvency regulation

Protection of creditors is a key objective of financial regulation. Where the protection needs are high, that is, in banking and insurance, regulatory solvency requirements are an instrument to prevent that creditors incur losses on their claims. The current regulatory requirements based on value at risk and average value at risk limit the probability of default of financial institutions, but they fail to control the size of recovery on creditors' claims in the case of default. We resolve this failure by developing a novel risk measure, recovery value at risk. Our conceptual approach is flexible and allows the construction of general recovery risk measures for various risk management purposes. We provide detailed case studies and applications. We show that recovery risk measures can be used for performance-based management of business divisions of firms and discuss how to calibrate recovery risk measures to historical regulatory standards. Finally, we analyze how recovery risk measures react to the joint distributions of assets and liabilities on firms' balance sheets and compare the corresponding capital requirements with the current regulatory benchmarks based on value at risk and average value at risk.