The paper analyses Islamic finance from the central bank and supervisory authority's perspective, focusing on the European and Italian context. It depicts a rapidly expanding sector, with recent annual growth rates of between 10 and 15 percent and a geographical presence that now reaches several...

More than three years since the outbreak of the sovereign debt crisis in the euro area the banking systems of several countries remain exposed to the vagaries of government bond markets. The paper analyzes the different channels through which sovereign risk affects banking risk (and vice versa),...

In the aftermath of the euro-area sovereign debt crisis, several commentators have questioned the favourable treatment of banks' sovereign exposures allowed by the current prudential rules. In this paper, we assess the overall desirability of reforming these rules. We conclude that the...

In 2007 the new framework for capital adequacy of banks (Basel 2), defined in 2004 by the Basel Committee for Banking Supervision, will replace the 1988 Accord (Basel 1) in all major countries. In the last years the Committee has carried out several impact studies in order to simulate the...

This paper develops a methodology for identifying systemically important financial institutions based on that developed by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (2011) and used by the Financial Stability Board in its yearly G-SIBs identification. The methodology uses publicly available data...

This paper studies what impact liquidity shocks have on liquid assets and domestic and cross-border lending. In particular, we look for differences across banks depending on their international exposure and we account for the effects of the sovereign debt crisis and the ECB's non-conventional...

This paper tests the role of different banks' liquidity funding structures in explaining the bank failures that occurred in the United States between 2007 and 2009. The results highlight that funding is indeed a significant factor in explaining banks' probability of default. By confirming the...

Extreme value theory is concerned with the study of the asymptotical distribution of extreme events, that is to say events which are rare in frequency and huge with respect to the majority of observations. Statistical methods derived from this theory have been increasingly employed in finance,...

This study provides a first assessment of Italian banks' exposure to physical risk arising from climate change in relation to lending to non-financial corporates. Based on granular data on loans and on the likelihood of climate-related events, we quantify to what extent physical risk could...

This paper analyses aggregate household wealth in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, the UK and the US. Building on a new data set for the time span 1980-2011, we discuss the trends in household financial assets in the last thirty years, the reasons for differences across countries,...