Recent research on central bank governance has focused mainly on their monetary policy task. As the sub-prime loan market turmoil reminded us - central banks play a crucial role in financial markets not only in setting monetary policy, but also in ensuring their soundness and stability. In this...

Many of the world’s developed economies have introduced, or are planning to introduce, bank bail-in regimes. Both the planned EU resolution regime and the European Stability Mechanism Treaty involve the participation of bank creditors in bearing the costs of bank recapitalization via the...

The merit of having international convergence of bank capital requirements in the presence of divergent closure policies of different central banks is examined. While the privately optimal level of bank capital decreases with regulatory forbearance (they are strategic substitutes), the socially...

This Paper shows that bank closure policies suffer from a ‘too-many-to-fail’ problem: when the number of bank failures is large, the regulator finds it ex-post optimal to bail out some or all failed banks, whereas when the number of bank failures is small, failed banks can be acquired by the...

As the number of bank failures increases, the set of assets available for acquisition by the surviving banks enlarges but the total amount of available liquidity within the surviving banks falls. This results in ‘cash-in-the-market’ pricing for liquidation of banking assets. At a...

This paper seeks to understand the interplay between banks, bank regulation, sovereign default risk and central bank guarantees in a monetary union. I assume that banks can use sovereign bonds for repurchase agreements with a common central bank, and that their sovereign partially backs up any...

Due to the severity of the financial market crisis most central banks reached the limits of their traditional monetary policy instruments and relied to a very large extent on instruments of unconventional monetary policy. In our paper we develop a simple theoretical framework for the money...

We model the interaction between two economies where banks exhibit both adverse selection and moral hazard and bank regulators try to resolve these problems. We find that liberalizing bank capital flows between economies reduces total welfare by reducing the average size and efficiency of the...

This Paper analyses the determinants of regulatory capital (the minimum required by regulation) and economic capital (the capital that shareholders would choose in absence of regulation) in the context of the single risk factor model that underlies the New Basel Capital Accord (Basel II). The...

This Paper presents a dynamic model of imperfect competition in banking where banks can invest in a prudent or a gambling asset. We show that if intermediation margins are small, the banks’ franchise values will be small, and in the absence of regulation only a gambling equilibrium will exist....