We study determinants of sovereign portfolios of Spanish banks over a long time-span, starting in 2008. Our findings challenge the view that banks engaged in moral hazard strategies to exploit the regulatory treatment of sovereign exposures. In particular, we show that being a weakly capitalized...

This paper studies the role of the financial sector in affecting domestic resource allocation and cross-border capital flows. I develop a quantitative, two-country, macroeconomic model in which banks face endogenous and occasionally binding leverage constraints. Banks lend funds to be invested...

This paper studies the role of international investment funds in the transmission of global financial conditions to the euro area using structural Bayesian vector auto regressions. While cross-border banking sector capital ows receded significantly in the aftermath of the global financial...

We show that the cash-flow exposure of banks to interest rate risk, or income gap, affects the transmission of monetary policy shocks to bank lending and real activity. We first use a large panel of U.S. banks to show that the sensitivity of bank profits to interest rates increases significantly...

I estimate the comparative causal effects of monetary policy "leaning against the wind" (LAW) and macroprudential policy on bank-level lending and leverage by drawing on a single natural experiment. In 1920, when U.S. monetary policy was still decentralized, four Federal Reserve Banks...

This paper examines the investment behavior of different financial institutions in debt securities with a particular focus on their response to price changes. For identification, we use security-level data from the German Microdatabase Securities Holdings Statistics. Our results suggest that...

Do politics matter for macroprudential policy? I show that changes to macroprudential regulation exhibit a predictable electoral cycle in the run-up to 221 elections across 58 countries from 2000 through 2014. Policies restricting mortgages and consumer credit are systematically less likely to...

We analyze the optimality of macroprudential policies in an environment where the role of the banking sector is to efficiently allocate liquid assets across firms. Informational frictions in the banking sector can lead to an interbank market freeze. Firms react to the breakdown of the banking...