This paper studies the impact of a financial transactions tax on a financial market where financial institutions trade with each other. Assets are marked to the market and financial institutions with negative equity are forced out of business. There are two main results: First, if all banks have...

We examine evidence for a systematic underperformance of Germany’s state-owned banks in the current financial crisis and study if the bank losses can be traced to the quality of bank governance. For this purpose, we examine the biographical background of 593 supervisory board members in the 29...

This paper analyzes the effect of the removal of government guarantees on bank risk taking. We exploit the removal of guarantees for German Landesbanken which results in lower credit ratings, higher funding costs, and a loss in franchise value. This removal was announced in 2001, but...

This brief exposition suggests that the Federal Reserve System temporarily guarantee a lower bound on stock prices in order to escape the current combination of liquidity trap and credit crunch. It shortly discusses reasons for this measure, consequences, and some alternatives. It is meant as a...

This paper studies loan activity in a context where banks must follow Basel Accord-type rules and acquire financing from households. Loan activity typically decreases when entrepreneurs’ investment returns decline, and we study which type of policy could revigorate an economy in a trough. We...

This paper presents a micro data approach to the identification of credit crunches. Using a survey among German firms which regularly queries the firms’ assessment of the current willingness of banks to extend credit we estimate the probability of a restrictive credit supply policy by time...

This paper addresses the impact of developments in the credit risk transfer market on the viability of a group of systemically important financial institutions. We propose a bank default risk model, in the vein of the classic Merton-type, which utilizes a multi-equation framework to model...

We study the welfare properties of a general equilibrium banking model with moral hazard that encompasses incentive mechanisms for bank risk-taking studied in a large partial equilibrium literature. We show that competitive equilibriums maximize welfare and yield an optimal level of banks’...

We examine to what extent banks’ stock market values during the 2007-2012 financial crisis were driven by increases in the default risk of banks designated as globally systemically important by the Financial Stability Board. We find that bank market values hardly respond to changes in the...

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...