In this paper we model and estimate ex ante safety-net benefits at a sample of large banks in US and Europe during 2003-2008. Our results suggest that difficult-to-fail and unwind (DFU) banks enjoyed substantially higher ex ante benefits than other institutions. Safety-net benefits prove...

To be effective, programs of regulatory reform must address the incentive conflicts that intensify financial risk-taking and undermine government insolvency detection and crisis management. Subsidies to risk taking that large institutions extract from the financial safety net encourage managers...

The intensity of the crisis in financial markets has surprised nearly everyone. This paper searches out the root causes of the crisis, distinguishing them from scapegoating explanations that have been used in policy circles to divert attention from the underlying breakdown of incentives....

This paper proposes a theoretically based and easy-to-implement way to measure the systemic risk of financial institutions using publicly available accounting and stock market data. The measure models the credit enhancement taxpayers provide to individual banks in the Merton tradition (1974) as...