A paper presented at the October 2003 conference quot;Beyond Pillar 3 in International Banking Regulation: Disclosure and Market Discipline of Financial Firms,quot; cosponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Jerome A. Chazen Institute of International Business at Columbia...

The paper analyses the relationship between deposit insurance, debt-holder monitoring, bank charter values, and risk taking for European banks. Utilising cross-sectional and time series variation in the existence of deposit insurance schemes in the EU, we find that the establishment of explicit...

The recent wave of mergers in the euro area raises the question, whether the increase in concentration has at least in part offset the increase in competition in European banking through deregulation. We test this question by estimating a simple Cournot model of bank pricing. We construct...

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

We analyse the ability to the distance-to-default and bond spreads to signal bank fragility. We show that both indicators are complete and unbiased and that spreads are non-linear in the probability of bank default. We empirically test these properties in a sample of EU banks. We find leading...

The recent consultative papers by the Basel Committee suggest an explicit role for external rating agencies in the assessment of the credit risk of banks' assets. In this context, an assessment of the information contained in credit ratings is important. We address this issue via an event study...

We propose a new approach to measuring the effect of unobservable private information or beliefs on volatility. Using high-frequency intraday data, we estimate the volatility effect of a well identified shock on the volatility of the stock returns of large European banks as a function of the...

This paper examines how personal bankruptcy and bankruptcy exemptions affect the supply and demand for credit. While generous state-level bankruptcy exemptions are probably viewed by most policy makers as benefiting less-well-off borrowers, our results using data from the 1983 Survey of Consumer...

We study how an increase to the deposit insurance limit affects households' portfolio allocation by exogenously reducing uninsured deposit balances. Using unique data that identifies insured versus uninsured deposits, along with detailed information on Canadian households' portfolio holdings, we...

We show that banks that are facing relatively high locally non-diversifiable risks in their home region expand more across states than banks that do not face such risks following branching deregulation in the United States during the 1990s and 2000s. Further, our evidence shows that these banks...