Conventional wisdom leads to assert that good governance may underpin bank performance while bad governance destroys stability and soundness. Using the banks in the Eurostoxx index, we run a factor analysis that enables us to synthesize 23 bank board characteristics into seven key features:...

The admission by the Greek government on October 18, 2009, of large-scale accounting fraud in its national accounts sparked an unprecedented sovereign debt crisis that rapidly spread to the Euro-Zone's weakest member states. As the crisis increasingly drove a wedge between a seemingly resilient...

This paper studies the impact of cyclical systemic risk on future bank profitability for a large representative panel of EU banks between 2005 and 2017. Using linear local projections we show that high current levels of cyclical systemic risk predict large drops in the average bank-level return...

This study is the first to analyse the relative importance of a number of the most cited determinants of bank risk and profitability using random forest’s relative value importance measure. The results show that a bank’s profitability is largely determined by bank-specific factors, while a...

This paper examines empirically the role of bank market power as an internal factor influencing banks’ reaction in terms of lending and risk-taking to monetary policy impulses. The analysis is carried out for the US and euro-area banking sectors over the period 1997-2010. Market power is...

If monetary policy is to aim also at financial stability, how would it change? To analyze this question, this paper develops a general-form framework. Financial stability objectives are shown to make monetary policy more aggressive: in reaction to negative shocks, cuts are deeper but...

There is a growing consensus that a prolonged period of low interest rates can exert a negative impact on financial stability through the risk-taking incentives of banks. Using micro-level datasets from the US banking sector, this paper finds evidence of a highly significant negative...

This paper addresses the impact of corruption on bank risk-taking behavior, using the bank-level data of more than 1200 banks in 35 emerging economies during the period 2000-2012. We find consistent evidence that more severe corruption increases the risk-taking of banks, in favor of the “sand...

In this study, I analyze the heterogeneous dynamics of the bank risk-taking channel of monetary policy under different business models before the recent financial crisis in the U.S. I find that banks' asset-side risk-taking in a low interest rate environment exhibits heterogeneity across...

We study how monetary policy affects the funding composition of the banking sector. When monetary tightening reduces the retail deposit supply, banks try to substitute the deposit outflows with wholesale funding to smooth their lending. Banks have varying degrees of accessibility to wholesale...