We study bailouts of banks that suffer from debt overhang problems and have private information about the quality of their assets-in-place and new investment opportunities. Menus of bailout plans are used as a screening device. Constrained-optimality involves over capitalization and nonlinear...

We use the term structure of spreads between rates on interest rate swaps indexed to LIBOR and overnight indexed swaps to infer a term structure of interbank risk. Using a dynamic term structure model, we decompose the term structure of interbank risk into default and non-default components. We...

Using the mechanics of creep in material sciences as a metaphor, we present a general framework to understand the evolution of financial, economic and social systems and to construct scenarios for the future. In a nutshell, highly non-linear out-of-equilibrium systems subjected to exogenous...

From 1973 to 2014, the common stock of U.S. banks with loan growth in the top quartile of banks over a three-year period significantly underperforms the common stock of banks with loan growth in the bottom quartile over the next three years. The benchmark-adjusted cumulative difference in...

U.S. banks have increasingly diversified into activities traditionally considered as non-core for the banking sector. This paper investigates whether diversification influences banks' investment (credit) policy and profitability. Diversified banks appear to benefit from “coinsurance,” supply...

If regulation fails to differentiate between priced and idiosyncratic risk, it incentivizes investors to reach for yield. Studying securitization exposures on the balance sheets of German banks, I show evidence consistent with this prediction. Banks with tight regulatory constraints (low capital...

We propose a methodology for measuring the market-implied capital of banks by subtracting from the market value of equity (market capitalization) a credit-spread-based correction for the value of shareholders' default option. We show that without such a correction, the estimated impact of a...

What is the impact of policy interventions on the systemic risk of banks? To answer this question, we analyze a comprehensive sample that combines an original set of bank-specific bailout events with balance sheets of key affected and non-affected European banks between 2005 and 2014. We find a...

We examine whether the relationship between managerial risk-taking incentives and bank risk is sensitive to the underlying macroeconomic conditions. We find that risk-taking incentives provided to bank executives are associated with higher bank riskiness during economic downturns. We attribute...