The proposed risk sensitive minimum requirements of the new Basel capital accord have raised concerns about possible (acceleration of) procyclical behaviour of banking, which might threaten macroeconomic stability. This paper analyses the interaction between business cycles and bank behaviour...

Government bonds receive preferential treatment in financial regulation. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of this preferential treatment on banks' demand for government bonds. Using unique transaction-level data, our analysis suggests that preferential treatment in liquidity...

This paper presents an analysis on the sensitivity of the Dutch interbank payment system with respect to the value transferred and the amount of available collateral. The Dutch system can be characterised as a system with a few large and many relatively small participants.Historical data has...

This paper provides an overview of the literature on intraday credit in payment systems to date and explores the dilemma central banks face when deciding on their intraday credit policies. On the one hand, any strategy in which the costs of liquidity are not fully borne by payment system...

This paper assesses the impact of an operational failure at one of the biggest participants in the Dutch interbank payment system, varying the time at which the disruption takes place. Liquidity levels equal historical levels. The impact of such a disruption is quantified in terms of the...

The current debate on the possible procyclicality of the new Basel Accord pays little attention to the procyclicality created by unsound loan loss provisioning. This paper investigates how bank provisioning behaviour is related to the business cycle, using 8,000 bank-year observations from 29...

The current debate on the possible procyclicality of the new Basel Accord pays little attention to the procyclicality created by unsound loan loss provisioning. This paper investigates how bank provisioning behaviour is related to the business cycle, using 8,000 bank-year observations from 29...

We test whether financial fluctuations affect firms' decisions, through their impact on banks' cost of funding. We exploit two shocks to Italian bank CDS spreads and equity valuations: the 2007-2009 financial crisis and the 2010-2012 sovereign debt crisis. Using newly available data linking over...