The recent banking crisis has revealed the existence of strong resiliency factors in the retail banking business model. On average, retail banks suffered less than other financial institutions from unexpected market changes. This paper proposes a new methodology to measure retail banks’...

We develop a model of bank risk-taking with strategic sovereign default risk. Domestic banks invest in real projects and purchase government bonds. While an increase in bond purchases crowds out profitable investments, it improves the government's incentives to repay and therefore lowers its...

Recent macro developments in the euro area have highlighted the interactions between fiscal policy, sovereign debt, and financial fragility. We take a structural macroeconomic model with frictions in the financial intermediation process, in line with recent research, but introduce asset choice...

We document that expansionary monetary policy shocks are less effective at stimulating output and investment in periods of high volatility compared to periods of low volatility, using a regime-switching vector autoregression. The lower effectiveness of monetary policy can be linked to weaker...

Broker-dealer leverage has recently proven to be strongly procyclical, exhibiting impressive explanatory power for a large cross-section of asset returns in the US. In this paper we add empirical evidence to this finding, showing that European and German broker-dealers actively manage their...

We develop an operational model of information contagion and show how it may be integrated into a mainstream, top-down, stress-testing framework to quantify systemic risk. The key transmission mechanism is a two-way interaction between the beliefs of secondary market investors and the...