<em>Is the financial crisis a test for Basel II?</em> - In the last few months the debate about the Basel II framework has been intensified by the extent of the current financial crisis. The main discussion focused also on the impact of the new capital regulation over the business cycle fluctuations....

We document the consequences of money market fund risk taking during the European sovereign debt crisis. Using a novel data set of security-level holdings of prime money market funds, we show that funds with large exposures to risky Eurozone banks suffered significant outflows between June and...

Over the past two decades, banks have increasingly focused on offering contingent credit in the form of credit lines as a primary means of corporate borrowing. We review the existing body of research regarding the rationales for banks' provision of liquidity insurance in the form of credit...

Stress tests have become an important component of the supervisory toolkit. However, the extent of disclosure of stress-test results remains controversial. We argue that while stress tests uncover unique information to outsiders — because banks operate in second--best environments with...

This report identifies a set of policy lessons for China today drawn from the experience of financial deregulation, financial crisis, and recovery in Scandinavia during the period 1985–2000. Although there are considerable differences between the huge Chinese economy and the small Nordic...

The recent financial crisis has raised several questions with respect to the corporate governance of financial institutions. This paper investigates whether risk management-related corporate governance mechanisms, such as for example the presence of a chief risk officer (CRO) in a bank’s...

This paper examines the relationship between stock returns and the sources of corporate debt during the financial crisis of 2008. In particular, using data on large-capitalization Russian firms, we investigate whether dependence on either bank debt or bonds affected stock returns during the...

Existing evidence shows convincingly that expected cash flows of non-financial firms can be negatively affected by their total risk, so that non-financial firms can create shareholder wealth by managing their total risk. After reviewing theories that demonstrate links between firm value and...

This paper identifies how bank branching benefited local economies during the Great Depression. Using archival data and narrative evidence, I show how Bank of America's branch network in 1930s California created an internal capital market to diversify away local liquidity shortfalls, allowing it...