Limited liability and asymmetric information between an investment bank and its lenders provide an incentive for a bank to undercapitalise and finance overly risky business projects. To counter this market failure, national governments have imposed solvency constraints on banks. However, these...

I review the state of the art of the academic theoretical and empirical literature on the potential trade-off between competition and stability in banking. There are two basic channels through which competition may increase instability: by exacerbating the coordination problem of...

The severity and depth of the recent financial crisis hit many by surprise. Despite warning signs, the financial system seems to have been unable to aggregate existing information. As the events of Fall 2008 showed, many investors were caught off guard by the large number of banks collapsing...

This paper examines the ramification of government capital injections into financially distressed banks during the 1997 Japanese banking crisis. By leveraging a unique dataset merging firm-level financial statements and bank balance sheets, the study aims to examine whether the capital...

I analyze the optimal design of banking supervision in the presence of cross-border lending. Cross-border lending could imply that an individual bank failure in one country could trigger negative spillover effects in another country. Such cross-border contagion effects could turn out to be...

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 paper analyzes the effect of the removal of government guarantees on bank risk taking. We exploit the removal of guarantees for German Landesbanken which results in lower credit ratings, higher funding costs, and a loss in franchise value. This removal was announced in 2001, but...

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...

We analyze the link between banking sector quality and sovereign risk in the whole European Union over 1999–2014. We employ four different indicators of sovereign risk (including market- and opinion-based assessments), a rich set of theoretically and empirically motivated banking sector...