This paper examines the effects of house prices on bank instability when gauged at various levels of income growth. Bank stability may respond differently to house price changes or deviations from fundamental values in an economic boom environment than in a bust circumstance. A threshold...

We estimate convergence in the European retail payments market during the period 1995–2011 for the most popular retail payment instruments: cash, debit card, credit card, direct debit, credit transfer, cheque and e-money. To estimate convergence, we employ the concepts of beta and sigma...

We show that changes in expectations of future income driven by exogenous factors (such as the discovery of oil and an increase in global demand for natural resources) can cause movements in the real exchange rate (RER) in excess of, and sometimes even in the opposite direction to, what one...

Several European countries face challenges reminiscent of those faced by the emerging economies of Latin America. The economic booms in some peripheral Euro-zone countries financed by large capital inflows; the credit and asset price booms and then the busts including Sudden Stops in capital...

This paper analyses changes in short-term interest rate expectations and uncertainty during ECB Governing Council days. For this purpose, it extends the estimation of risk-neutral probability density functions up to tick frequency. In particular, the non-parametric estimator of these densities,...

The Federal Reserve’s unconventional monetary policy announcements in 2008–2009 substantially reduced international long-term bond yields and the spot value of the dollar. These changes closely followed announcements and were very unlikely to have occurred by chance. A simple portfolio...

Historical Simulation (HS) and its variant, the Filtered Historical Simulation (FHS), are the most popular Value-at-Risk forecast methods at commercial banks. These forecast methods are traditionally evaluated by means of the unconditional backtest. This paper formally shows that the...

We examine the impact of ownership on income diversification and risk for Indian banks over the period 2001–2009. We investigate both the determinants of non-interest income and the impact of diversification on various profitability and insolvency risk measures for public sector, private...

What drives bankers to create larger and larger, often multinational banking groups? In this paper we investigate whether the targets in cross-border bank M&As are materially different from those banks targeted in domestic M&A deals. The main message of this paper is that, with few exceptions,...

This paper examines the determinants of bank net interest margin (NIM) and non-traditional banking activities (NII). A system estimation approach is employed to control for the simultaneity between NIM and NII for commercial banks in a group of 28 financially liberalized countries during the...