On 3 July 2015, SUERF organized its sixth joint conference with the Bank of Finland in Helsinki on the subject of liquidity and market efficiency. The one-day program consisted of an opening speech, six presentations, including three keynotes, and a lunchtime address. The present SUERF Study...

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...

In this paper, by employing a novel approach, we study the relationship between bank type and small-business lending in a post-transition country. Using a unique dataset on bank branches and firm-level data, we find that local cooperative banks lend more to small businesses than do large...

I propose a financial stress index (FSI) for the Finnish financial system that aims to reflect the functionality of the financial system and provide an aggregate measure of financial stress in the money, bond, equity and foreign exchange markets and the banking sector. The FSI is a composite...

This theoretical paper explores screening with loan collateral when both the collateral value and the probability of project success fluctuate. Some model versions challenge the classic findings of Bester (1985) by showing that high-risk borrowers may in such case be more willing to pledge...

Consider a competitive bank whose illiquid asset portfolio is funded by short-term debt that has to be refinanced before the asset matures. We show that in this setting maximal transparency is not socially optimal, and that the existence of social externalities of bank failures further lowers...

This paper demonstrates that subordinated debt (‘subdebt’ thereafter) regulation can be an effective mechanism for disciplining banks. Under our proposal, investors buy the subdebt of a bank only if they receive favourable information about the bank, and the bank is subject to a regulatory...

We aim to assess how accurately accounting and stock market indicators predict rating changes for Asian banks. We conduct a stepwise process to determine the optimal set of early indicators by tracing upgrades and downgrades from rating agencies, as well as other relevant factors. Our results...

This paper provides cross-country evidence that variations in bank regulatory policies result in differences in income distribution. In particular, the overall liberalization of banking systems decreases the Gini coefficient and the Theil index significantly. However, this effect fades away for...