Previous studies of the announcement effects of relaxing administrative and legislative restraints show that signal events leading up to the enactment of the Financial Services Modernization Act (FSMA) increased the prices of several classes of financial-institution stocks. An unsettled question...

Risk-shifting occurs when creditors or guarantors are exposed to loss without receiving adequate compensation. This paper seeks to measure and compare how well authorities in 56 countries controlled bank risk shifting during the 1990s. Although significant risk shifting occurs on average,...

On June 4-5, 2014, SUERF and Baffi Finlawmetrics jointly organised a Colloquium/Conference “Money, Regulation and Growth: Financing New Growth in Europe” at Bocconi University, Milan. The present SUERF Study includes a selection of papers based on the authors’ contributions to the Milan...

Traditionally, individual states have shared responsibility for regulating the US insurance industry. The Dodd-Frank Act changes this by tasking the Federal Reserve with regulating the systemic risks that particularly large insurance organizations might pose and assigning the regulation of...

Officials must show that they understand why and how the public's confidence in the federal government's ability to manage financial turmoil was lost. Leaders of the Treasury, Federal Reserve, and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission must face up to their institutions' roles in an...

The success of any treatment plan depends on how completely the problems it targets have been diagnosed. The precrisis bubble in securitization can be traced to incentive conflict that allows national safety nets to subsidize leveraged risk-taking. Safety-net subsidies encouraged...

On 5-6 September 2012 SUERF held its 30th Colloquium “States, Banks, and the Financing of the Economy” at the University of Zürich, Switzerland. The papers included in this SUERF Study are based on contributions to the Colloquium. All the papers in this publication discuss from different...

This paper models and estimates ex ante safety-net benefits at a sample of large banks in US and Europe during 2003-2008. Our results suggest that difficult-to-fail and unwind (DFU) banks enjoyed substantially higher ex ante benefits than other institutions. Safety-net benefits prove...

This paper provides a comprehensive, global database of deposit insurance arrangements as of 2013. We extend our earlier dataset by including recent adopters of deposit insurance and information on the use of government guarantees on banks' assets and liabilities, including during the recent...

To be effective, programs of regulatory reform must address the incentive conflicts that intensify financial risk-taking and undermine government insolvency detection and crisis management. Subsidies to risk taking that large institutions extract from the financial safety net encourage managers...