This paper presents evidence that banks react to regulation in a forward-looking manner. A case study documents a reaction to Basel II as early as 2000, in other words about seven years prior to the implementation of the regulation in 2007. Based on the initial information released on Basel II,...

We study the relationship between banks’ size and risk-taking in the context of supranational banking supervision. Consistently with theoretical work on banking unions and in contrast to analyses emphasising incentives underpinned by the too-big-to-fail effect, we find an inverse relationship...

In the wake of the still ongoing global financial crisis, bank interdependencies have come into focus in trying to assess linkages among banks and systemic risk. To date, such analysis has largely been based on numerical data. By contrast, this study attempts to gain further insight into bank...

We study the effect of counterparty risk on the ability of Italian banks to access the foreign unsecured interbank market during the sovereign debt crisis in the second half of 2011. With the onset of the crisis, interest rates in the Italian interbank market soared and foreign lending decreased...

We test if unconventional monetary policy instruments influence the competitive conduct of banks. Between q2:2010 and q1:2012, the ECB absorbed €218 billion worth of government securities from five EMU countries under the Securities Markets Programme (SMP). Using detailed security holdings...

Financial institutions are key to allocate capital to its most productive uses. In order to examine the relationship between productivity and bank credit in the context of different financial market set-ups, we introduce a model of overlapping generations of entrepreneurs under complete and...

This paper examines whether European regions which incorporate banks with a higher intermediation quality grow faster and are more resilient to negative shocks than its less efficient peers. For this purpose, we measure a bank's intermediation quality by estimating its profit and cost efficiency...

We study the impact of increasingly negative central bank policy rates on banks' propensity to become undercapitalized in a financial crisis ('SRisk'). We find that the risk impact of negative rates is moderate, and depends on banks' business models: Banks with diversified income streams are...

The post-2008 period in the euro area was characterised by sharp dispersion in borrowing costs faced by firms, across both countries and firm types. This dispersion was an important manifestation of the "financial fragmentation" which hampered the smooth transmission of accommodative monetary...

We propose a novel observation-driven finite mixture model for the study of banking data. The model accommodates time-varying component means and covariance matrices, normal and Student's t distributed mixtures, and economic determinants of time-varying parameters. Monte Carlo experiments...