On September 17, 2008, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued an emergency order banning the shorting of 797 financial stocks. This paper studies the impact of the short selling ban on the credit derivatives market by investigating credit default swap (CDS) prices during the period...

On September 17, 2008, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued an emergency order banning the shorting of 797 financial stocks. This paper studies the impact of the short selling ban on the credit derivatives market by investigating credit default swap (CDS) prices during the period...

This note provides the first empirical assessment of the dynamic interrelation between government bond spreads and their associated credit default swaps (CDS). We use data for the Southern European countries (Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain) that found themselves with a problematic public...

We document the development of the major international banks since the late nineties, analysing balance sheet data for 27 large and complex financial institutions. We argue that balance sheet expansion and business line diversification paved the way to the rise of the universal banking model....

This paper addresses the following questions: which was the contribution of banks’assets to the US’ expansion in the period until the financial crisis? Did commercial banks respect capital requirements? The two questions are strictly interrelated as, according to a recent literature,...

The most pernicious effect of the global financial crisis is that it triggers a sequence of unpleasant consequences for the banking sector and for the entire economy as a whole. The recent financial crisis has compelled regulators to focus on the necessity of resilience of banks towards risks...

Excessive credit growth is often considered to be an indicator of future problems in the financial sector. This paper examines the issue of how best to determine whether the observed level of private sector credit is excessive in the context of the “countercyclical capital buffer”, a...

Trust in banks appears to be an essential element of well-functioning of macroeconomic systems, in general, and of financial markets, in particular. We study what factors determine the level of trust in banks before and after the 2007-08 financial crisis and how this crisis reshaped banking...

Additionally to the financial crisis causing a world recession, Liechtenstein’s financial sector has been challenged by the so-called “Zumwinkel-Affair”, when a whistle-blower sold data of hundreds of tax evaders to international tax authorities. This paper investigates the impact of this...

The admission by the Greek government on October 18, 2009, of large-scale accounting fraud in its national accounts sparked an unprecedented sovereign debt crisis that rapidly spread to the Eurozone’s weakest member states. As the crisis increasingly drove a wedge between a seemingly resilient...