Historical time-series data is short relative to the frequency of political and economic crises. This makes it difficult to use pure time-series methods to identify the impacts of safe haven demand on asset prices, in the face of confounding effects from a wide range of alternative drivers. We...

The impact of U.S. bank loan announcements on the stock prices of the corporate borrowers has been decreasing during the two last decades with estimated two-day cumulative abnormal returns slipping from almost 200 basis points in the beginning of the 1980s to close to zero by the turn of the...

The crisis of 2007-09 has been characterized by a sudden freeze in the market for short-term, secured borrowing. We present a model that can explain a sudden collapse in the amount that can be borrowed against finitely-lived assets with little credit risk. The borrowing in this model takes the...

In this paper we investigate how well banks manage their reserves. The optimal policy takes into account expected foregone interest on excess reserves and penalty costs for going below required reserves. Using a unique panel data-set on daily clearing house settlements of a cross-section of...

Unclear bailout policy, underinvestment and calls for greater responsibility by bankers are some of the observations from the recent financial crisis. The paper explains underinvestment as an inefficient equilibrium. Under ambiguous bailout policy agents suffer from a lack of information about...

We report experimental evidence on the effect of observability of actions on bank runs. We model depositors’ decision-making in a sequential framework, with three depositors located at the nodes of a network. Depositors observe the other depositors’ actions only if connected by the network....

Central banks (CBs) in Europe and the US have been providing virtually unlimited amounts of liquidity to banks for quite some time now. This may lead banks to expect that these CBs will be lenient in the future. Will this expectation be justified? I present a model in which a commercial bank,...

We analyze banks’ pooling of corporate loans and propose Pareto-improving sharing rules that depend only on the relative sizes of the loans. Implementation of these sharing rules do not require any precise knowledge of default probabilities or default correlations.

We provide the first evidence that changes in risk-based capital requirements for banks affect the real economy through international trade. Using a natural experiment – mandatory Basel II adoption in its Standardized Approach by all banks in Turkey on July 1, 2012 – we investigate the...

The 2004 Basel II accord requires internationally active banks to hold regulatory capital for operational risk, and the Federal Reserve's Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review (CCAR) requires banks to project operational risk losses under stressed scenarios. As a result, banks subject to...