This paper critically reviews the debate on CRAs and, in the light thereof, analyses the European regulatory approach to CRAs, thereby combining insights from economics and law. We first provide some basic background on the function of CRAs. Thereafter, we focus on the two main tasks for which...

How damaging is competition between bank regulators? This paper develops a model in which both banks' risk profile and their access to wholesale funding are endogenous. Regulators weigh not only welfare, but also the number of banks under their supervision. Simulations indicate that the gains...

We test if interconnectedness in the interbank market is a channel through which banks affect each others riskiness. The evidence is based on quarterly bilateral exposures of all banks active in the Dutch interbank market between 1998 and 2008. A spatial lag model, borrowed from regional...

We investigate whether banks use of loan loss provisions (LLPs) to manage the level and volatility of their earnings and examine the implications for bank risk. We find that banks use LLPs to manage the level and volatility of earnings downward when they are abnormally high and when expected...

This paper models a financial sector in which there is a feedback between individual bank risk and aggregate funding market problems. Greater individual risk taking worsens adverse selection problems on the market. But adverse selection premia on that market push up bank risk taking, leading to...

This paper examines how credit risk affects bank lending and the business cycle. We estimate a panel Vector Autoregression model for an unbalanced sample of 12 OECD countries over the past two to three decades, consisting of the output gap, inflation, the short-term interest rate, bank lending,...

This study contributes to the empirical evidence on the lending channel in the Netherlands using individual bank data. The main conclusion is that a lending channel is operative in the Netherlands. However, it is only operative for unsecured and not for secured lending, possibly because loans...

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...

Using loan-level data, we find that syndicated lending by European banks with sizeable balance sheet exposures to impaired sovereign debt was negatively affected after the start of the euro area sovereign debt crisis. We also observe a reallocation away from foreign (especially US) markets. The...

Do tightenings of bank lending standards permanently reduce bank lending? We construct a measure of a bank's level of lending standards using micro-data from the sample of banks participating in the Eurosystem Bank Lending Survey in The Netherlands and show that this level measure affects...