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...

How do banks respond to changes in capital requirements as a result of the stress tests? Does the disclosure of stress test results matter? To answer these questions, we study the impact of European stress tests on banks' lending, their corresponding risk-taking, the ensuing effect on their...

The primary driver of commercial bank failures during the Great Recession was exposure to the real estate sector, not aggregate funding strains. The main \toxic" exposure was credit to non-household real estate borrowers, not traditional home mortgages or agency-issued MBS. Private-label MBS...

This paper examines common regulation as cause of interbank contagion. Studies based on the correlation of bank assets and the extent of interbank lending may underestimate the likelihood of contagion because they do not incorporate the fact that banks have a common regulator. In our model, the...

We exploit the 2007-2009 financial crisis to analyze how risk relates to bank business models. Institutions with higher risk exposure had less capital, larger size, greater reliance on short-term market funding, and aggressive credit growth. Business models related to significantly reduced bank...

This paper provides the first empirical evidence that bank regulation is associated with cross-border spillover effects through the lending activities of large multinational banks. We analyze business lending by 155 banks to 9613 firms in 1976 different localities across 16 countries. We find...

This paper presents evidence that banks react to regulation in a forward-looking manner. A case study documents a reaction to Basel II as early as 2000, in other words about seven years prior to the implementation of the regulation in 2007. Based on the initial information released on Basel II,...

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...

Europe’s financial structure has become strongly bank-based – far more so than in other economies. We document that an increase in the size of the banking system relative to equity and private bond markets is associated with more systemic risk and lower economic growth, particularly during...

In this paper, we analyze how sources of political influence relate to the actual regulatory treatment of distressed banks and to the expectation of bank support provided by the government. We assemble a unique dataset that links U.S. banks’ sources of influence (e.g., lobbying expenditures,...