The global financial crisis highlighted a number of weaknesses in the regulatory framework, including concerns about excessive variability in banks' risk-weighted assets (RWAs) stemming from their use of internal models. The Basel III reforms that were finalised in 2017 by the Basel Committee on...

Post-crisis stress tests have helped to enhance financial stability and to reduce banks' risk-taking. In order to quantify their overall impact, regulators have turned to evaluating the effects of stress tests on financing and the real economy. Using the U.S. as a laboratory, this paper shows...

We use trades by US corporate insiders to investigate bank opacity, both in absolute terms and relative to other firms. On average, bank insider sales do not earn an abnormal return and do not predict stock returns. By contrast, bank insider purchases do, even though less than other firms. Our...

This study examines bank risk by investigating the equity and loan portfolio characteristics of publicly-traded bank holding companies. Unlike the pattern for non-financial firms, equity betas of large banks are two to five times greater than those of small banks. In explaining this, we note...

Money markets are fundamentally different from stock markets. Stock markets are about price discovery for the purpose of allocating risk efficiently. Money markets are about obviating the need for price discovery using over-collateralised debt to reduce the cost of lending. Yet, attempts to...

Securitization was meant to disperse credit risk to those who were better able to bear it. In practice, securitization appears to have concentrated the risks in the financial intermediary sector itself. This paper outlines an accounting framework for the financial system for assessing the impact...

The recent financial crisis has triggered a major rethink of analytical approaches and policy towards financial stability. The crisis has encouraged a sharper focus on systemic risk, the inclusion of a financial sector in macroeconomic models, a shift from a microprudential to a macroprudential...

We develop a measure of systemic importance that accounts for the extent to which a bank propagates shocks across the banking system and is vulnerable to propagated shocks. Based on Shapley values, this measure gauges the contribution of interconnected banks to systemic risk, in contrast to...

The paper examines the basic rationale and features of the proposals adopted to separate specific investment and commercial banking activities (Volcker rule, Vickers and Liikanen proposals). In particular, it focuses on the likely implications of such initiatives for: (i) financial stability and...

We present a network model of the interbank market in which optimizing risk averse banks lend to each other and invest in non-liquid assets. Market clearing takes place through a tâtonnement process which yields the equilibrium price, while traded quantities are determined by means of an...