The recent financial and sovereign debt crises around the world have sparked a growing literature on models and empirical estimates of defaultable debt. Frequently households and firms come under default threat, local governments can default, and recently sovereign default threats were eminent...

Do firms select their main bank relationship according to their risk or risk preferences? Relationship banking is attractive for high risk firms since it improves their access to finance and provides liquidity insurance. Low risk firms instead may not want to bear the additional costs. I employ...

This paper documents that standard cross-sectional determinants of firm leverage also apply to the capital structure of large banks in the United States and Europe. We find a remarkable consistency in sign, significance and economic magnitude. Like non-financial firms, banks appear to have...

The paper empirically investigates the monetary transmission mechanism in the Baltic States. The analysis of the transmission channels through which monetary policy shocks are transmitted is particularly important for the European Central Bank that makes monetary policy in an enlarged European...

This paper examines the treatment of sovereign debt exposure within the Basel framework and measures the impact of bank regulation on the demand of Monetary Financial Institutions (MFI) for marketable sovereign debt. Our results suggest that bank regulation has a significant positive impact on...

This paper discusses the incentive conflicts that arise in banking supervision in the EU in a principal-agent framework, where the regulator is the agent and the taxpayers is the principal. The regulatory agent in addition to maintaining financial stability (the objective of the principal) may...

The provision of public goods often relies on voluntary contributions and cooperation. While most of the experimental literature focuses on individual contributions, many real-world problems involve the formation of institutions among subgroups (coalitions) of players. International agreements...

This paper experimentally analyzes the effects if signatories to an international environmental agreement (IEA) apply different voting schemes to determine the terms of the agreement. To this end, unanimity, qualified majority voting, and simple majority voting are compared with respect to the...

This paper complements the empirical literature on sovereign debt restructurings by analyzing potential determinants of (near-term) follow-up restructurings after a restructuring has taken place. The probability of follow-up restructurings is estimated by means of survival models using a unique...

A mechanism to restructure the debt of an insolvent euro country is a missing element in the emerging institutional architecture of the euro area. The introduction of an insolvency procedure for sovereigns faces a dilemma: In the foreseeable future, its introduction would risk pushing Europe...