This study finds that equity returns in the banking sector in the wake of the Great Recession and the European sovereign debt crisis have been driven mainly by weak growth prospects and heightened sovereign risk and to a lesser extent, by deteriorating funding conditions and investor sentiment....

Monetary policy transmission may be impaired if banks rebalance their portfolios towards securities. We identify the bank lending and risk-taking channels of monetary policy by exploiting – Italian's unique – credit and security registers. In crisis times, with higher ECB liquidity, less...

Banking crises are recurrent phenomena, often induced by ex-ante excessive bank risk-taking, which may be due to behavioral reasons (over-optimistic banks neglecting risks) and to agency problems between bank shareholders with debt-holders and taxpayers (banks understand high risk-taking). We...