Based on a sample of 63 listed European banks, this paper investigates the relationship of capital and asset quality, in terms of provisioning and coverage policies, with bank risk and performance during the period 2005Q1-2018Q4. Our results point out different relationships between risk-based and non-risk-based measures of capital with bank risk and performance profiles. In particular, the information content of the leverage ratio appears to be merely related to the bank dimensional feature, whereas the total capital ratio shows a positive and statistically significant relationship with bank stability and is also negatively related to insolvency risk, thereby suggesting a crucial role for capital for the overall bank resilience. In addition, more capitalized banks are associated with higher bank performance. Regarding asset quality, hefty coverage and provisioning policies are generally associated with both lower bank resilience and performance. These results are relevant for disentangling the implications that the regulatory overhaul set out to address the NPLs issue is having on banking activity.
