How can tax policy improve financial stability? Recent studies suggest large stability gains from eliminating the debt bias in corporate taxation. It is well known that this reform reduces bank leverage. This paper analyzes a novel, complementary channel: risk taking. We model banks’ portfolio...

We analyse the drivers of total factor productivity of Spanish banks from early 2000, including the last financial crisis and the post-crisis period. This allows us to study changes in productivity following a major restructuring process in the banking sector such as the one experienced in...

Do macroprudential regulations on residential lending influence commercial lending behavior too? To answer this question, we identify the compositional changes in banks' supply of credit using the variation in their holdings of residential mortgages on which extra capital requirements were...

This paper considers the optimal taxation of savings intermediation and payment services in a dynamic general equilibrium setting, when the government can also use consumption and income taxes. When payment services are used in strict proportion to final consumption, and the cost of...

This paper investigates how multinational banks use internal debt to shift profits to low-taxed affiliates. Using regulatory data on multinational banks headquartered in Germany, we show that banks use this tax avoidance channel more aggressively than non-financial multinationals do. We find...

Traditionally banks have used securitization for expanding credit and thus their profitability. It has been well documented that, at least before the 2008 crisis, many banks were keeping a high proportion of the securities that they created on their own balance-sheets. Those securities retained...

This paper is one of the first to investigate the determinants of bond issuance by European banks. We use a unique database of around 50,000 bonds issued by 63 banks from 14 European countries to test explicitly a broad set of hypotheses on the drivers of bond issuance. The sample covers the two...

This paper shows that heterogeneity in bank capitalization ratios plays a crucial role in the transmission of monetary policy to bank lending. First, I offer new empirical evidence on how banks’ lending responses to monetary policy shocks depend on their capitalization ratios. Highly...

Buffers for systemically important institutions (SIIs) were designed to mitigate the risks posed by these large and complex banks. With a panel data model for a sample of listed European banks, we demonstrate that capital requirements for SIIs effectively reduce the perceived systemic risk of...

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...