This paper evaluates the impact of the March 2020 European Central Bank recommendation that banks do not pay dividends or buy back shares on their market values. It documents a causal negative impact on bank share prices of around 7% during the two weeks following its announcement. The...

We study the impact of ECB's supervisory announcements on the Bank Stock index, from 2013 through 2017. Our evidence shows that the news, related to supervisory actions, do have highly significant effects on the market price of banks, contributing to the volatility of the Bank Stock Index for...

The cost of equity for banks equates to the compensation that market participants demand for investing in and holding banks’ equity, and has important implications for the transmission of monetary policy and for financial stability. Notwithstanding its importance, the cost of equity is...

The scope of this paper is to examine if and how the establishment of the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) influenced the profitability of European banks. To do so, we employ the returns on assets and equity as alternative indicators for profitability. Using data for 344 European banks in...

European Banking Union (EBU) is an odd construction born of compromises and shaped to fit into legal territory bounded by EU Treaty constraints that cannot be adjusted in the current political environment. Can EBU work in spite of the limitations of its design or is there dangerous papering over...