Our paper analyses confidential letters sent from the Bank of England's Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) to banks and building societies it supervises. These letters are a ‘report card' written to firms annually, and are arguably the most important, regularly recurring written...

Since the crisis financial regulators and supervisors have been given increased independence from political bodies. But there is no clear evidence of the benefits of these reforms on the stability of the banking sector. This paper fills that void, introducing a new dataset of reforms to...

How well equipped are today's macroprudential regimes to deal with a re-run of the factors that led to the global financial crisis? We argue that a large proportion of the fall in US GDP associated with the crisis can be explained by two factors: the fragility of financial sector — represented...

The regulation of bank capital to improve the resilience of the financial system and, related to this aim, as a means of smoothing the credit cycle are central elements of forthcoming macroprudential regimes internationally. For such regulation to be effective in controlling the aggregate supply...

While the too-big-to-fail guarantee is explicitly a part of bank regulation in many countries, this paper shows that bank closure policies also suffer from an implicit too-many-to-fail problem: when the number of bank failures is large, the regulator finds it ex-post optimal to bail out some or...

We investigate how counterparties' characteristics, and the collateral they use, interact with their demand for liquidity in the Bank of England's (BoE) operations. Between 2010 and 2016 there was regular usage of two BoE facilities: Indexed Long-Term Repos (ILTR) and the Funding for Lending...

This paper examines whether cross-border spillovers of macroprudential regulation depend on the organisational structure of banks' foreign affiliates. Our analysis compares the response of foreign banks' branches versus subsidiaries in the United Kingdom to changes in macroprudential regulations...

We use a DSGE model with financial frictions, leverage limits on banks, loan to value (LTV) limits and debt‑service ratio (DSR) limits on mortgage borrowing to examine: i) the effects of different macroprudential policies on key macro aggregates; ii) their interaction with each other and with...

Banks' liquidity is a crucial determinant of the adversity of banking crises. In this paper, we consider the effect of fire sales and entry during crises on banks' ex-ante choice of liquid asset holdings. We consider a setting with limited pledgeability of risky cash flows relative to safe ones...

Macroprudential policies have been shown to be beneficial during booms but there is limited evidence on how well they operate during periods of stress. Using a difference‑in‑differences empirical strategy we test whether regulatory capital buffers, a key component of the Basel III reforms,...