In general, banks play a growth-enhancing role for the real economy. However, distorted incentives for banks, depositors, and regulators in connection with bank insolvency may corrupt banks' credit allocation and monitoring decisions, leading to suboptimal real economic outcomes. A rules-based...

In Europe, the financial stability mandate generally rests at the national level. But there is an important exception. Since the establishment of the Banking Union in 2014, the European Central Bank (ECB) can impose stricter regulations than the national regulator. The precondition is that the...

We model a banking union of two countries whose banking sectors differ in their average probability of failure and externalities between the two countries arise from cross-border bank ownership. The two countries face (i) a regulatory (super- visory) decision of which banks are to be shut down...

On the occasion of related proposals by the European Commission and the Eurogroup, this paper proposes to entrust the ESM with the hosting of the ESRB in the medium term. The novel proposal aims at strengthening the macro-prudential expertise of the ESM and at enhancing the independence of the...

Several countries have recently introduced national capital standards exceeding the internationally coordinated Basel III rules, which is inconsistent with the 'race to the bottom' in capital standards found in the literature. We study regulatory competition when banks are heterogeneous and give...

We show that banks' risk exposure in one asset category affects how they report regulatory risk weights for another asset category. Specifically, banks report lower credit risk weights for their loan portfolio when they face higher risk exposure in their trading book. This relationship is...

Regulation needs effective supervision; but regulated entities may deviate with unobserved actions. For identification, we analyze banks, exploiting ECB’s asset-quality-review (AQR) and supervisory security and credit registers. After AQR announcement, reviewed banks reduce riskier securities...

Multi-agency financial stability committees (FSCs) have grown dramatically since the global financial crisis. However, most cannot direct actions or recommend to other agencies that they take actions, and most would influence policy actions only through convening and discussing risks. We...

This paper deals with both system-wide and banks' internal stress tests. For system-wide stress tests it describes the evolution over time, compares the stress test design in major jurisdictions, and discusses academic research. System-wide stress tests have gained in importance and nowadays...