The recent period of crisis in credit markets has highlighted the crucial role of bank risk taking. Our paper assesses the inter-temporal relationships among bank efficiency, capital and bank risk-taking in the EU-26 commercial banking industry between 1995 and 2007. Our results support the bad...

It has often been argued during the recent credit crisis that commercial banks’ involvement in investment banking activities might have had an impact on the intensity of their underwriting standards. We turn to evidence from the period prior to the complete revocation of the Glass-Steagall Act...

We investigate the effect of relatively loose monetary policy on bank risk through a large panel including quarterly information from listed banks operating in the European Union and the United States. We find evidence that relatively low levels of interest rates over an extended period of time...

We find that the increased use of securitization activity in the banking sector augmented the effect of competition on realized bank risk during the 2007-2009 crisis. Our results suggest that securitization by itself does not lead to augmented risk while higher levels of capital do not buffer...

We exploit the 2007-2009 financial crisis to analyze how risk relates to bank business models. Institutions with higher risk exposure had less capital, larger size, greater reliance on short-term market funding, and aggressive credit growth. Business models related to significantly reduced bank...