Does higher capital maintenance drive up banks cost of equity? Evidence from Bangladesh

Abstract

This paper assesses whether the higher capital maintenance drives up banks cost of equity. We investigate the hypothesis using fixed effect panel estimation with the data from a sample of 28 publicly listed commercial banks over the 2013 to 2019 periods. We find a significant negative relationship between banks capital and cost of equity. Empirically our baseline estimates entail that a 10 percent increase in capital would reduce the cost of equity by 4.39 percent.