How does asset encumbrance affect the fragility of intermediaries subject to rollover risk? We offer a model in which a bank issues covered bonds backed by a pool of assets that is bankruptcy remote and replenished following losses. Encumbering assets allows a bank to raise cheap secured debt...

Regulatory bank levies set incentives for banks to reduce leverage. At the same time, corporate income taxation makes funding through debt more attractive. In this paper, we explore how regulatory levies affect bank capital structure, depending on corporate income taxation. Based on bank balance...

Traditional theory suggests that higher bank profitability (or franchise value) dissuades bank risk-taking. We highlight an opposite effect: higher profitability loosens bank borrowing constraints. This enables profitable banks to take risk on a larger scale, inducing risk-taking. This effect is...

We study how contingent capital affects banks' risk choices. When triggered in highly levered states, going-concern conversion reduces risk-taking incentives, unlike conversion at default by traditional bail-inable debt. Interestingly, contingent capital (CoCo) may be less risky than bail-inable...

We investigate how banks' capital and lending decisions respond to changes in bankspecific capital and disclosure requirements. We find that an increase in the bankspecific regulatory capital requirement results in a higher bank capital ratio, brought about via less asset risk. A decrease in the...

This paper shows that firm credit constraints impair climate policy. Empirically, firms with tighter credit constraints, measured by their distanceto-default, exhibit a relatively smaller emission reduction after a carbon tax increase. We incorporate this channel into a quantitative DSGE model...

Mutual fund risk-taking via active portfolio rebalancing varies both in the cross-section and over time. In this paper, I show that the same is true for funds' off- balance sheet risk-taking, even after controlling for on-balance sheet activities. For this purpose, I propose a novel measure of...

Correlated defaults and systemic risk are clearly priced in credit portfolio securities such as CDOs or index CDSs. In this paper we study an extensive CDX data set for evidence whether correlated defaults are also present in the underlying CDS market. We develop a cash flow based top-down...