Recent policy discussion includes the introduction of diversification requirements for sovereign bond portfolios of European banks. In this paper, we evaluate the possible effects of these constraints on risk and diversification in the sovereign bond portfolios of the major European banks....

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...

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...

We study the impact of changes in regulations and policy interventions on systemic risk among European sovereigns measured as volatility spillovers in respective credit risk markets. Our unique intraday CDS dataset allows for precise measurement of the effectiveness of these events in a network...

Using novel monthly data for 226 euro-area banks from 2007 to 2015, we investigate the causes and effects of banks' sovereign exposures during and after the euro crisis. First, in the vulnerable countries, the publicly owned, recently bailed out and less strongly capitalized banks reacted to...