We investigate regulatory arbitrage during the G20's global derivatives market reform. Using hand-collected data on staggered reform progress, we find that banks shift their trading towards less regulated jurisdictions. The result is driven by agenda items – such as the promotion of central...

This paper models the strategic interaction between a rating agency, a banking sector and a bank regulator who lacks information about bank asset risk. The regulator can either (1) make bank capital requirements contingent on credit ratings; or (2) set rating independent capital requirements....

U.S. banks have increasingly diversified into activities traditionally considered as non-core for the banking sector. This paper investigates whether diversification influences banks' investment (credit) policy and profitability. Diversified banks appear to benefit from “coinsurance,” supply...

What is the impact of policy interventions on the systemic risk of banks? To answer this question, we analyze a comprehensive sample that combines an original set of bank-specific bailout events with balance sheets of key affected and non-affected European banks between 2005 and 2014. We find a...

We study how supranational capital regulation incentivizes national authorities to exercise forbearance and how this affects the regulatory capital of banks across countries. Using the 2011 EBA capital exercise as a quasi-natural experiment, we find that banks substantially inflated their levels...

We study how banks react to policy announcements during the representative policy cycle of consultation and policy publication. We use unique data covering the population of all mortgage transactions in the UK complemented with regulatory risk assessments of banks and their supervisory...

Bank bailouts are not the "one-shot" events commonly described in the literature. These bailouts are instead dynamic processes in which regulators "catch" financially distressed banks; "restrict" their activities over time; and "release" the banks from restrictions at sufficiently healthy capital...

We investigate the risk taking incentives of "stressed banks" - the banks that are subject to annual regulatory stress tests in the U.S. since 2011. We document that stress tests effectively encourage prudent investment from stressed banks through regulatory monitoring, but also provide them...

We employ proprietary data from a large bank to analyze how – in times of crisis – depositors react to a bank nationalization, re-privatization and an accompanying increase in deposit insurance. Nationalization slows depositors fleeing the bank, provided they have sufficient trust in the...