The 5th joint SUERF/Bank of Finland joint conference was held in Helsinki on 13 June 2013. The general theme of the conference was to focus on the regulatory reforms after the global financial crisis and, in particular, how structural reforms of banking ("Volcker, Vickers and Liikanen") could...

There is substantial evidence that new banks and rapidly growing banks are risk prone. We study this problem by designing a relationship-lending model in which a bank operates as a financial intermediary and centralised monitor. In the absence of deposit insurance, the bank’s limited liability...

This paper examines blanket guarantee and restructuring decisions in respect of a multinational bank (MNB) using Nash bargaining, when the threat of a panic motivates countries to take decisions quickly. The failure of the bank would cause unevenly distributed externalities between the countries...

Transparency regulation aims at reducing financial fragility by strengthening market discipline. There are however two elementary properties of banking that may render such regulation inefficient at best and detrimental at worst. First, an extensive financial safety net may eliminate the...

This study demonstrates that the common view, whereby an increase in competition leads banks to increased risk taking, fails to hold in an environment where consumers can choose in which bank to make a deposit based on their knowledge of the riskiness incorporated in the banks' outstanding loan...

We consider the joint effect of competition and deposit insurance on risk taking by banks when the riskiness of banks is unobservable to depositors. It turns out that the magnitude of risk taking depends on the type of bank competition. If the bank is a monopoly or banks compete only in the loan...

In this paper, we investigate the relationship between the transparency of banks and the fragility of the banking system. We show that information-based bank runs may be inefficient because the deposit con-tract designed to provide liquidity induces depositors to have excessive incentives to...

Using an unbalanced panel of commercial, savings and co-operative banks for the years 1997 to 2004 we examine the cyclical behaviour of European bank capital buffers. After controlling for other potential de-terminants of bank capital, we find that capital buffers of the banks in the accession...

Although beneficial allocational effects have been a central motivation for the Basel II capital adequacy reform, the interaction of these effects with Basel II’s procyclical impact has been less discussed. In this paper, we investigate the effect of Basel II on the efficiency of bank lending....