Does enhanced shareholder liability reduce bank failure? We compare the performance of around 4,200 state-regulated banks of similar size in neighboring U.S. states with different liability regimes during the Great Depression. The distress rate of limited liability banks was 29% higher than that...

Can central banks defuse rising stability risks in financial booms by leaning against the wind with higher interest rates? This paper studies the state-dependent effects of monetary policy on financial stability. Based on the near-universe of advanced economy financial cycles since the 19th...

Using evidence from Russia, we explore the effect of the introduction of deposit insurance on bank risk. Drawing on variation in the ratio of firm deposits to total household and firm deposits before the announcement of deposit insurance, so as to capture the magnitude of the decrease in market...

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...

This paper investigates the impact of banking prudential regulation on sovereign risk. We show that prudential regulation reduces sovereign risk and induces governments to spend more. As a result, countries with tight prudential regulation have lower primary budget balances and accumulate more...

During the last decades a consensus has emerged that it is impossible to disentangle liquidity shocks from solvency shocks. As a consequence the classical lender of last resort rules, as defined by Thornton and Bagehot, based on lending to solvent illiquid institutions appear ill-suited to this...

We examine how financial crises redistribute risk, employing novel empirical methods and micro data from the largest financial crisis of the 20th century – the Great Depression. Using balance-sheet and systemic risk measures at the bank level, we build an econometric model with incidental...

Banking reform has proved to be one of the most problematic elements of economic transition in central and Eastern Europe. Therefore the paper considers the development of the Estonian banking sector and derives individual banks´ fragility scores during transition. To this end we use...

This study is an empirical investigation of theoretical predictions concerning the impact of bank competition on bank risk and asset allocations. Recent work (Boyd, De Nicolò and Jalal, 2009, BDNJ henceforth) predicts that as competition in banking increases, the loan-to-asset ratio will rise...

This paper investigates (i) whether growth and profitability persist in banking firms, (ii) whether the level and volatility of growth and profitability are bank-size dependent, and (iii) the relationship between growth and profitability of a bank. Using a dynamic panel model estimated by GMM...