Bank regulation might have contributed to or even reinforced adverse systemic shocks that materialised during the financial crisis. Capital regulation based on risk-weighted assets encourages innovation designed to circumvent regulatory requirements and shifts banks’ focus away from their core...

A financial crisis leads to a debt overhang in the banking sector and subsequently to a credit crunch. In most cases, it is not possible to remedy this situation without economic policy measures. In this study, we use a uniform framework to analyze how banks in a crisis situation can be...

Financial regulation today is largely framed by traditional business categories. The financial markets, however, have begun to bypass those categories, principally over the last thirty years. Chief among the changes has been convergence in the products and services offered by traditional...

The global economy has a chronic shortage of safe assets which lies behind many recent macroeconomic imbalances. This paper provides a simple model of the Safe Asset Mechanism (SAM), its recessionary safety traps, and its policy antidotes. Safety traps share many common features with...

Banks cannot be made fail-safe. But they can be made safe to fail, so that the failure of a bank need not disrupt the economy at large nor pose cost to the taxpayer. In other words, banks can be made resolvable, and “too big to fail” can come to an end. To do so, the authorities, banks and...

This paper empirically analyzes the determinants of banks' systemic importance. In constructing a measure on the systemic importance of financial institutions we find that size is a leading determinant. This confirms the usual "Too big to fail'' argument. Nevertheless, banks with size above a...

Executive pay regulation is widely discussed as a measure to reduce financial mismanagement in corporations. We show that the professional team sports industry, the only industry with substantial experience in the regulation of compensation arrangements, provides valuable insights for the...

Executive pay regulation is widely discussed as a measure to reduce financial mismanagement in corporations. We show that the professional team sports industry, the only industry with substantial experience in the regulation of compensation arrangements, provides valuable insights for the...

The financial crisis has revealed the dysfunction of all banking and financial regulatory mechanisms. Prudential regulation failed to prevent the meltdown. Market discipline neglected to send any warning signals. Internal control was seriously undermined by doubtful dealings, in France as...

The ongoing global economic crisis has punished Asian economies severely, despite the fact that its origins derive from outside the region. The global economic crisis was transmitted through real and financial channels, underscoring how vulnerable the region is to external shocks. This paper...