Banks play a special role as providers of informative signals about the quality and value of their borrowers. Such signals, however, may have a quality of their own as the banks' selection and monitoring abilities may differ. Using an event study methodology, we study the importance of the...

This paper investigates the effects of interbank rate uncertainty on lending rates to euro area firms. We introduce a novel measure of interbank rate uncertainty, computed as the cross-sectional dispersion in interbank market rates on overnight unsecured loans. Using proprietary bank-level data,...

This paper uses the co-incidence of extreme shocks to banksu0092 risk to examine within country and across country contagion among large EU banks. Banksu0092 risk is measured by the first difference of weekly distances to default and abnormal returns. Using Monte Carlo simulations, the paper...

This paper addresses a very European issue, the consolidation of securities trading and settlement infrastructures. In a two-country model, we analyze welfare implications of different types of consolidation. We find that horizontal integration of settlement systems is better than vertical...

We study the effect of interbank market integration on small firm finance in the build-up to the 2007-2008 financial crisis. We use a comprehensive data set that contains contract terms on individual loans to 6,047 firms across 14 European countries between 1998:01 and 2005:12. We account for...

As the global banking crisis intensified in the fall of 2008, governments announced comprehensive rescue packages for financial institutions. In this paper, we put the joint response of euro area bank and sovereign CDS premia under the microscope. We find that the bank rescue packages led to a...

We study the effect of interbank market integration on small firm finance in the build-up to the 2007-2008 financial crisis. We use a comprehensive data set that contains contract terms on individual loans to 6,047 firms across 14 European countries between 1998:01 and 2005:12. We account for...

We exploit the 2007-2009 financial crisis to analyze how risk relates to bank business models. Institutions with higher risk exposure had less capital, larger size, greater reliance on short-term market funding, and aggressive credit growth. Business models related to significantly reduced bank...

This paper investigates the relationship between bank funding costs and solvency for a large sample of euro area banks using two proprietary ECB datasets for both wholesale funding costs and deposit rates. In particular, the paper studies the relationship between bank solvency, on the one hand,...

In this paper, we empirically investigate the impact of intensified competition on rating quality in the credit rating market for residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) in the period 2017-2020. We provide evidence that competition between large credit rating agencies (CRAs) (Moody's and...