In the aftermath of the Great Financial Crisis, regulators have rushed to strengthen banking supervision and implement bank resolution regimes. While such resolution regimes are welcome to reintroduce market discipline and reduce the reliance on taxpayer-funded bailouts, the effects on the wider...

This paper characterizes the optimal banking union with endogenous participation in a two-country economy in which domestic bank failures may be contemporaneous to sovereign crises, giving rise to risk-sharing motives to mutualize the funding of bail-outs. Raising public funds to conduct a...

Euro area governments have committed to break the doom loop between bank risk and sovereign risk. But policymakers have not reached consensus on whether and how to reform the regulatory treatment of banks' sovereign exposures. To inform policy discussions, this paper simulates portfolio...

Using household survey data, we document evidence of a loosening of credit standards in Euro area countries that experienced a property price boom-and-bust cycle. Borrowers in these countries exhibited significantly higher loan-to-value (LTV) and loan-to-income (LTI) ratios in the run up to the...

This paper studies leverage regulation and monetary policy when equity investors and/or creditors have distorted beliefs relative to a planner. We characterize how the optimal leverage regulation responds to arbitrary changes in investors' and creditors' beliefs and relate our results to...

The paper investigates the effectiveness of dividend-based macroprudential rules in complementing capital requirements to promote bank soundness and sustained lending over the cycle. First, some evidence on bank dividends and earnings in the euro area is presented. When shocks hit their profits,...

This paper argues that the European Unions Banking Recovery and Resolution Directive (BRRD) improved market discipline in the European bank market for unsecured debt. The different impact of the BRRD on bank bonds provides a quasi-natural experiment that allows to study the effect of the BRRD...

We quantify the gains from regulating maturity transformation in a model of banks which finance long-term assets with non-tradable debt. Banks choose the amount and maturity of their debt trading off investors' preference for short maturities with the risk of systemic crises. Pecuniary...

The declared intention of policy makers is that future bank restructuring should be conducted through bail-in rather than bail-out. Over the past years there have been a few cases of European banks being restructured where creditors were bailed in. This paper exploits these events to investigate...

We analyze the strategic interaction between undercapitalized banks and a supervisor who may intervene by preventive recapitalization. Supervisory forbearance emerges because of a commitment problem, reinforced by fiscal costs and constrained capacity. Private incentives to comply are lower when...