This article develops a search-theoretic model of financial intermediation to study the efficiency condition of the banking sector. Competitive financial intermediation is determined by the search decisions of both households (to find adequate financial products) and banks (to attract depositors...

A number of studies have pointed to various mistakes that consumers might make in their consumption-saving and financial decisions. We utilize a unique market experiment conducted by a large U.S. bank to assess how systematic and costly such mistakes are in practice. The bank offered consumers a...

Market discipline for financial institutions can be imposed not only from the liability side, as has often been stressed in the literature on the use of subordinated debt, but also from the asset side. This will be particularly true if good lending opportunities are in short supply, so that...

Some have argued that recent increases in credit risk transfer are desirable because they improve the diversification of risk. Others have suggested that they may be undesirable if they increase the risk of financial crises. Using a model with banking and insurance sectors, we show that credit...

A number of studies have pointed to various mistakes that consumers might make in their consumption-saving and financial decisions. We utilize a unique market experiment conducted by a large U.S. bank to assess how systematic and costly such mistakes are in practice. The bank offered consumers a...

Market discipline for financial institutions can be imposed not only from the liability side, as has often been stressed in the literature on the use of subordinated debt, but also from the asset side. This will be particularly true if good lending opportunities are in short supply, so that...

In this paper we use a reduced form model for the analysis of Portfolio Credit Risk. For this purpose, we fit a Dynamic Factor model, DF, to a large dataset of default rates proxies and macrovariables for Italy. Multi step ahead density and probability forecasts are obtained by employing both...

In this paper, using industry sector stock returns as proxies of firm asset values, we obtain bank capital requirements (through the cycle). This is achieved by Montecarlo simulation of a bank loan portfolio loss density. We depart from the Basel 2 analytical formula developed by Gordy (2003)...

This paper examines the impact of bank concentration on bank financial distress using a balanced panel of commercial banks belonging to EU 25 over the sample period running from 2003 to 2007. Financial distress is proxied by the observations falling below a given threshold of the empirical...

In the context of the financial crisis, many projects of bank levies have emerged. Yet, there is very little evidence on the incidence of bank taxes and, hence, it is not clear who will bear the burden of the new taxes. In this paper, we investigate the ability of banks to shift corporate income...