The euro crisis was fueled by the diabolic loop between sovereign risk and bank risk, coupled with cross-border flight-to-safety capital flows. European Safe Bonds (ESBies), a union-wide safe asset without joint liability, would help to resolve these problems. We make three contributions. First,...

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...

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...

We propose a model of asset encumbrance by banks subject to rollover risk and study the consequences for fragility, funding costs, and prudential regulation. A bank's choice of encumbrance trades off the benefit of expanding profitable investment funded by cheap long-term secured debt against...

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...

We build a moral hazard model to study incentives of financial intermediaries (shortly, bankers) facing a leverage-insurance trade-off in their investment choice. We demonstrate that the choice is affected by two recent transformations of the financial ecosystem bankers inhabit: (i) the rise of...

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...

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....