We explore the impact of concentration in the banking markets on the capital structure of publicly quoted non-financial firms in the EU15 over the period 1997- 2005, an era marked by intensive merger activity in the banking sector. Our main finding is a negative and significant relationship...

In this paper we investigate whether or not observed changes in the composition of the sovereign bond portfolios of European banks are determined by a risk-return trade-off. Banks have been shown to disproportionally invest in bonds issued by their domestic sovereign, causing a negative...

During the financial crisis, 114 European banks benefited from government support in Europe. We investigate the financial condition of banks before and after receiving state support using logit regressions. Our results indicate that the equity ratio, loan quality and bank size are the main...

Using bank CDS spreads, we examine three types of determinants of Euro Area bank default risk in the period 2008-2019: bank characteristics related to new regulation, the bank-sovereign nexus and the monetary policy stance. We find that Basel 3 regulation improves the banks’ risk profile since...