The recent crisis has shown that systemically relevant banks in distress are likely to benefit from governmental support. This reduces their downside risk and leads to moral hazard, i.e. to incentives for these banks to assume excessive risks. In this paper we show empirically that implicit...

We investigate regulatory arbitrage during the G20's global derivatives market reform. Using hand-collected data on staggered reform progress, we find that banks shift their trading towards less regulated jurisdictions. The result is driven by agenda items – such as the promotion of central...

In this paper, we examine the relationship between banks’ approval for the internal ratings-based (IRB) approaches of Basel II and the ratio of risk-weighted assets to total assets. Analysing a panel of 115 banks from 21 OECD countries that were eventually approved for applying the IRB to...

In this paper, we analyse a novel panel data set to compare the relevance of alternative measures of capitalisation for bank failure during the 2007-10 crisis, and to search for evidence of manipulated Basel risk-weights.  Compared with the unweighted leverage ratio, we find the risk-weighted...