This paper examines how the interactions between the valuation regime and solvency requirements influence investment behaviour of long-term investors with stable liabilities, such as life insurers. Under limited liability, solvency requirements based on historical cost valuation encourage...

Asset quality is an essential part of sound banking. However, asset quality is difficult for banking regulators and investors to assess in the absence of a common, cross-border scheme to classify assets. Currently no standard is applied universally to classify loans, the most sizable asset on...

Asset quality is an essential part of sound banking. However, asset quality is difficult for banking regulators and investors to assess in the absence of a common, cross-border scheme to classify assets. Currently no standard is applied universally to classify loans, the most sizable asset on...

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...

Using regulatory data on credit unions, this paper provides empirical evidence on the determinants of credit union failure in the United Kingdom. We find that a small set of financial attributes related to capital adequacy, asset quality, earnings performance and liquidity is useful for early...

We study how banks' capital level affects the extent to which they engage in liquidity transformation. We first construct a simple model to develop testable hypotheses on this link. Then we test our predictions and establish the causality using a confidential Bank of England dataset that...

We use quantile regression to examine the links between competition and firm-level solvency risk for all banks and building societies in the United Kingdom between 1994 and 2013. Quantile regression provides a finer picture of the relationship (as compared with standard regression techniques)...

In 1853 a Royal Commission was set up to investigate whether laws related to limited liability in Britain needed to be modified. As part of its evidence gathering the commission issued a questionnaire that included a number of questions on whether banks should be subject to the same liability...

We study the impact of higher capital requirements on banks' decisions to grant collateralized rather than uncollateralized loans. We exploit the 2011 EBA capital exercise, a quasi-natural experiment that required a number of banks to increase their regulatory capital but not others. This...

Over the last decade, banks around the world have been confronted with substantialmisconduct costs. We employ provisions for misconduct costs as an instrumentalvariable to identify the causal effect of a bank capital shock on risk-taking.Using new hand-collected data, we show that misconduct...