Cooperative banks are small and their survival is not guaranteed by the "Too Big To Fail" policy so that their default can be concrete in time of crises. We analyze the contribution of efficiency to cooperative bank probability of default. We estimate several measures of bank efficiency...

In this work we develop advanced techniques for measuring bank insolvency risk. More specifically, we contribute to the existing body of research on the Z-Score. We develop bias reduction strategies for state-of-the-art Z-Score measures in the literature. We introduce novel estimators whose aim...

Enforcement actions (or sanctions) pursue two complementary goals, namely to penalize guilty companies and to provide an example to other companies that bad behaviour will be penalized. Although the recent financial crisis showed that this topic is critical in banking, only a few papers (e.g....

We investigate the causal relationship between the efficiency of country’s judicial system and the quality of bank lending, using the contracts enforcement reforms that have been implemented in four European countries as a quasi-natural experiment. We find that strengthening of contract...

Past papers show that public bailouts increase the moral hazard of rescued banks. What happens to other banks in the banking sector? Using a hand-collected dataset of European banks from 2007 to 2017 and adopting a dynamic difference-in-differences approach, we document that public bailouts...

The recent financial crisis has shown that the stability of the investment banking industry plays a key role for the soundness of the financial system as a whole. Do high competition and/or cost inefficiencies increase investment banks' insolvency (and capital) risks? Or, conversely, do...