The financial crisis clearly illuminated the potential amplifying role of financial factors on macroeconomic developments. Indeed, the heavy impairments of banks' balance sheets brought to the fore the banking sector's ability to provide a smooth flow of credit to the real economy. However, most...

We develop a partial adjustment model in order to estimate the factors contributing to banks' internal target capital ratio, lending policy and holding of securities. The model is estimated on a panel of listed euro area banks and country specific macrovariables. Firstly, banks' internal target...

We examine the relation between capital and liquidity creation. This issue is interesting because of the potential impact on liquidity creation from tighter capital requirements such as those in Basel III. We perform Granger-causality tests in a dynamic GMM panel estimator framework on an...

In 2001, government guarantees for savings banks in Germany were removed following a law suit. We use this natural experiment to examine the effect of government guarantees on bank risk taking, using a large data set of matched bank/borrower information. The results suggest that banks whose...

The paper shows that mispriced deposit insurance and capital regulation were of second order importance in determining the capital structure of large U.S. and European banks during 1991 to 2004. Instead, standard cross-sectional determinants of non-financial firms' leverage carry over to banks,...

We provide evidence that a weak banking sector has contributed to low productivity growth following the European sovereign debt crisis. An unexpected increase in capital requirements for a subset of Portuguese banks in 2011 provides a natural experiment to study the effects of reduced bank...

Basel III has introduced a non-risk-weighted leverage ratio requirement (LRR) which complements the internal ratings based (IRB) capital requirements. It provides a backstop against model risk which arises if some loans get incorrectly rated and become toxic. We study the effects of the LRR on...

How do near-zero interest rates affect optimal bank capital regulation and risk-taking? I study this question in a dynamic model, in which forward-looking banks compete imperfectly for deposit funding, but households do not accept negative deposit rates. When deposit rates are constrained by the...

Following the financial crisis, the share of non-performing loans has significantly increased, while the regulatory guidelines on the Internal-Ratings Based (IRB) approach for capital adequacy calculation related to defaulted exposures remains too general. As a result, the high-risk nature of...

We study the functioning and possible breakdown of the interbank market in the presence of counterparty risk. We allow banks to have private information about the risk of their assets. We show how banks' asset risk affects funding liquidity in the interbank market. Several interbank market...