The financial crisis has led to a reconsideration of banks’ global business models. Using a dataset derived from the BIS banking statistics, this paper studies the geography of global banking. It distinguishes between “international” and “multinational” banks, their respective funding...

We build a bank-specific, fixed-effects regression model to develop proxies for a bank's monitoring effort. Our results show that banks that devote more resources to monitoring (based on these proxies) are more profit efficient and the effect is large. A very important theoretical literature in...

The objectives of this paper are, first, to analyze whether banks’ risk-taking can be explained by factors contributing to implicit guarantees and by factors associated with banks’ business models. Second, it analyzes how risk-taking associated with these factors has changed from a period...

This research explores the effects of securitization on banks equity risk exposure. A widespread opinion before the crisis of 2007–2008 was that securitization enhances financial stability. We provide empirical evidence of the impact of securitization on the market's perception of the...

We examine bank-level changes in the relationship between earnings and loan loss provisioning, a measure of earnings management, following the tightening of accounting constraints associated with the SEC's 1998 SunTrust Bank decision. By exploiting both temporal variation in the regulatory...

In this study, we examine non-government-assisted US commercial bank merger activity prior to and during the recent financial crisis. Mergers that occur throughout the crisis appear to be more significant events for both targets and acquirers. Acquirers seek out relatively larger targets during...

This paper studies the effect of banking system concentration on unemployment in developing countries. Using data on 42 developing countries, it finds that more concentration increased unemployment over the period 1987–2007. The magnitude of the effect is substantial. The result is robust to...

We examine the market reaction and shift in risk from nine prominent government interventions in response to the crisis between February 2007 and July 2009 on four types of institutions: banks, savings and loan associations (S&Ls), insurance companies, and real estate investment trusts (REITs)....

This paper investigates the effect that the creation of the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) has had on the interest rate risk which banks and life insurance companies face in the UK. By means of GARCH-M methodology, the stock returns are modelled on the CAPM and the Fama-French asset-pricing...

I test the implications of borrower–lender physical and organizational distance for the loan default rate of Italian firms. I use a macro data set for the 1997–2011 period, which allows me to consider the effects of the international financial crisis too. I find that physical distance...