How do banks respond to changes in capital requirements as a result of the stress tests? Does the disclosure of stress test results matter? To answer these questions, we study the impact of European stress tests on banks' lending, their corresponding risk-taking, the ensuing effect on their...

IFRS 9 substantially affects the financial sector by changing the impairment methodology for credit losses. This paper analyzes the implications of the change from IAS 39 to IFRS 9 in the context of bank resilience. We shed light on two effects. First, the "cliff-effect", which refers to sudden...

This paper explores whether foreign intermediaries stabilise or destabilise lending to the real economy in the presence of sovereign stress in the domestic economy and abroad. Tensions in the government debt market may lead to serious disruptions in the provision of lending (i.e., the so-called...

We study the impact of higher bank capital buffers, namely of the Other Systemically Important Institu- tions (O-SII) buffer, on banks' lending and risk-taking behaviour. The O-SII buffer is a macroprudential policy aiming to increase banks' resilience. However, higher capital requirements...

Loan loss provisions in the euro area are negatively related to GDP growth, i.e., they are procyclical. Loan loss provisions tend to be more procyclical at larger and better capitalized banks. The procyclicality of loan loss provisions can explain about two-thirds of the variation of bank...

We explore whether the transparency in banks' lending activities enhances the harmonization of credit terms that a bank offers across its different geographic regions. We take advantage of a novel loan-level reporting initiative by the European Central Bank, which requires repo borrowing banks...

We contribute to the empirical literature on the impact of non-performing loan (NPL) ratios on aggregate banking sector variables and the macroeconomy by estimating a panel Bayesian VAR model for twelve euro area countries. The model is estimated assuming a hierarchical prior that allows for...

We show that the speed and type of corporate deleveraging depends on the interaction between corporate and financial sector health. Based on granular bank-firm data pertaining to small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) from five stressed and two non-stressed euro area economies, we show that...

We use a unique dataset of ratings for euro area corporate loans from commercial banks' internal rating-based (IRBs) systems and central banks' in-house credit assessment systems (ICASs) to investigate whether banks' IRB ratings underestimate the credit risk of their corporate loan portfolios...