This paper studies the long-run evolution of bank risk and its links to the macroeconomy. Using data for 17 advanced economies, we show that the riskiness of bank assets declined materially between 1870 and 2016. But even though bank assets have become safer, the losses on these assets are...

This paper studies the effects of government guarantees on the interconnection between banking and sovereign debt crises in a framework where both the banks and the government are fragile and the credibility and feasibility of the guarantees are determined endogenously. The analysis delivers...

Euro area governments have committed to break the doom loop between banks and sovereigns. But policymakers disagree on how to treat sovereign exposures in bank regulation. Our contribution is to model endogenous sovereign portfolio reallocation by banks in response to regulatory reform....

We analyse the effects of supranational versus national banking supervision on credit supply, and its interactions with monetary policy. For identification, we exploit: (i) a new, proprietary dataset based on 15 European credit registers; (ii) the institutional change leading to the...

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...

We assess whether central bank credit operations influence the size and composition of bank credit in a negative interest rate environment. We exploit confidential information from the newly established European credit registry to capture bank lending conditions and bank risk-taking. For...

This paper addresses the trade-off between additional loss-absorbing capacity and potentially higher bank risk-taking associated with the introduction of the Basel III Leverage Ratio. This is addressed in both a theoretical and empirical setting. Using a theoretical micro model, we show that a...

How far should capital requirements be raised in order to ensure a strong and resilient banking system without imposing undue costs on the real economy? Capital requirement increases make banks safer and are beneficial in the long run but also entail transition costs because their imposition...

We show that negative monetary policy rates induce systemic banks to reach-for-yield. For identification, we exploit the introduction of negative deposit rates by the European Central Bank in June 2014 and a novel securities register for the 26 largest euro area banking groups. Banks with more...

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...