The observed high levels of banks' operating efficiency, profi ts and market values in the years before the fi nancial crisis raise reasonable doubts about the information content of conventional performance measures for the accurate assessment of the effi ciency of banking intermediation. In...

The fallout from the 2008 financial crisis has been particularly acute in the euro area Member States of the south-western rim and in the new EU Member States, due to their previously accumulated macroeconomic and financial imbalances. The perception that the euro environment provided a solid...

During the last crisis, developed economies' sovereign Credit Default Swap (hereafter CDS) premia have gained in importance as a tool for approximating credit risk. In this paper, we fit a dynamic factor model to decompose the sovereign CDS spreads of ten OECD economies into three components: a...

Empirical work on the underlying causes of the recent dislocations in bank-intermediated trade finance has been limited by the scant availability of hard data. This paper aims to analyse the key determinants of bank-intermediated trade finance using a novel dataset covering ten banking...

Despite France's importance in the interwar world economy, the scale and consequences of the French banking crises of 1930–1931 were never assessed quantitatively due to lack of data in the absence of banking regulation. Using a new dataset of individual balance sheets from more than 400...

Using international listed banks from the United States, Europe, Japan and China from 2004 to 2014, we analyse the effect on bank risk of some of the most relevant new elements of the prudential regulatory framework proposed in the wake of the Great Financial Crisis. We measure risk by a market...

This paper investigates the foreign funding mix of globally active banks. Using BIS international banking statistics for a panel of 12 advanced economies, we detect a structural break in international bank funding at the onset of the great financial crisis. In their post-break business model,...

A growing empirical literature has shown, based on structural vector autoregressions (SVARs) identified through sign restrictions, that unconventional monetary policies implemented after the outbreak of the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) had expansionary macroeconomic effects. In a recent paper,...

We analyse the market liquidity level and resilience of US 10-year Treasury bonds. Having checked that five indicators show inconclusive results on the liquidity level, we fit a bivariate CC-GARCH model to evaluate its resilience, that is, how liquidity reacts to financial shocks. According to...

A number of theoretical and empirical studies have shown that the development of credit markets is affected by the efficacy of enforcement institutions. A less explored question is how these institutions interact with turns in the economic cycle and the impact of different types of legal...