This paper studies the long-run evolution of bank risk and its links to the macroeconomy. Using data for 17 advanced economies, we show that the riskiness of bank assets declined materially between 1870 and 2016. But even though bank assets have become safer, the losses on these assets are...

This paper develops a theory of the credit cycle to account for recent evidence that capital is increasingly allocated to inefficiently risky projects over the course of the boom. The model features lenders who sell risk exposure to non-lender investors in order to relax borrowing constraints,...

We study the functioning and possible breakdown of the interbank market in the presence of counterparty risk. We allow banks to have private information about the risk of their assets. We show how banks’ asset risk affects funding liquidity in the interbank market. Several interbank market...

This paper studies the relative pricing of euro area sovereign CDS and the underlying government bonds. Our sample comprises weekly CDS and bond spreads of ten euro area countries for the period from January 2006 to June 2010. We first compare the determinants of CDS spreads and bond spreads and...

We study the functioning of secured and unsecured interbank markets in the presence of credit risk. The model generates empirical predictions that are in line with developments during the 2007-2009 financial crises. Interest rates decouple across secured and unsecured markets following an...

We study the interaction between borrowers' and banks' solvency in a quantitative macroeconomic model with financial frictions in which bank assets are a portfolio of defaultable loans. We show that ex-ante imperfect diversification of bank lending generates bank asset returns with limited...

This paper studies the effects of government guarantees on the interconnection between banking and sovereign debt crises in a framework where both the banks and the government are fragile and the credibility and feasibility of the guarantees are determined endogenously. The analysis delivers...

Euro area governments have committed to break the doom loop between banks and sovereigns. But policymakers disagree on how to treat sovereign exposures in bank regulation. Our contribution is to model endogenous sovereign portfolio reallocation by banks in response to regulatory reform....

This paper proposes a semi-structural approach to identifying excessive household credit developments. Using an overlapping generations model, a normative trend level for the real household credit stock is derived that depends on four fundamental economic factors: real potential GDP, the...

We analyse the effects of supranational versus national banking supervision on credit supply, and its interactions with monetary policy. For identification, we exploit: (i) a new, proprietary dataset based on 15 European credit registers; (ii) the institutional change leading to the...