In Europe, the financial stability mandate generally rests at the national level. But there is an important exception. Since the establishment of the Banking Union in 2014, the European Central Bank (ECB) can impose stricter regulations than the national regulator. The precondition is that the...

We analyze the impact of the announcement of the banking union on stock market returns of euro area banks against the backdrop of three commonly held views of the banking union. We document positive individual abnormal returns for most banks. Abnormal returns are large and positive on average,...

We model a banking union of two countries whose banking sectors differ in their average probability of failure and externalities between the two countries arise from cross-border bank ownership. The two countries face (i) a regulatory (super- visory) decision of which banks are to be shut down...

The paper investigates the optimal design of bank bailouts. Under three types of ex post moral hazard that tempt banks to hide loan losses, the paper analyzes banking regulation via three Prompt Corrective Action instruments: prohibition of dividends, limits on compensation to managers and early...

In this paper we introduce two measures, the Systemic Liquidity Buffer (SLB) and the Systemic Liquidity Shortfall (SLS) to assess liquidity in the banking system. The SLB takes an aggregated perspective on liquidity risks in the banking system. In contrast, the SLS focusses on the problematic...

What is the impact of a sudden and sizeable increase in bank capital requirements on the lending activity by directly affected banks and by non-affected non-bank financial institutions (NBFIs)? To answer this question, we apply a difference-in-differences methodology around the capital exercise...

We integrate Basel II (and III) regulations into the industrial organization approach to banking and analyze the interaction between capital adequacy regulation and credit risk transfer with credit default swaps (CDS) including its effect on lending behavior and risk sensitivity of a...

In this paper, we use detailed data on the sovereign debt holdings of all German banks to analyse the determinants of sovereign debt exposures and the implications of sovereign exposures for bank risk. Our main findings are as follows. First, sovereign bond holdings are heterogeneous across...

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we present an up-to-date assessment of the differences across euro area countries in the distributions of various measures of debt conditional on household characteristics. We consider three different outcomes: the probability of holding debt, the amount...

In this paper, we analyze the impact of banks' non-interest income share on risk in the German banking sector for the period between 2002 and 2010. Using linear and quantile regression estimators, we find that the impact of non-interest income on risk significantly differs depending on banks’...