We test for the existence of a moral hazard effect attributable to official crisis lending by analyzing the evolution of sovereign bond spreads in emerging markets before and after the Russian crisis. The nonbailout of Russia in August 1998 is interpreted as an event that decreased the perceived...

Lecture on the first SFB/TR 15 meeting, Gummersbach, July, 18 - 20, 2004The explicit or implicit protection of banks through government bail-out policies is a universal phenomenon. We analyze the competitive effects of such policies in two models with different degrees of transparency in the...

In an influential paper, La Porta, Lopez-De-Silanes and Shleifer (2002) argued that public ownership of banks is associated with lower GDP growth. We show that this relationship does not hold for all countries, but depends on a country’s financial development and political institutions. Public...

This paper yields a rationale for why subsidized public banks may increase regional welfare in a financially integrated economy. We present a model with credit rationing and heterogeneous regions in which public banks prevent a capital drain from poorer to richer regions by subsidizing local...

This paper shows that the abolition of state guarantees to publicly owned banks in Germany resulted in an increase in funding costs at German savings banks. Rather than being the result of increased market discipline, the increase in funding costs is shown to be driven by spillover effects from...

This paper shows that bonus contracts may arise endogenously as a response to agency problems within banks, and analyzes how compensation schemes change in reaction to anticipated bail-outs. If there is a risk-shifting problem, bail-out expectations lead to steeper bonus schemes and even more...

We analyze the reactions of stock returns and CDS spreads of banks from Europe and the United States to four major regulatory reforms in the aftermath of the subprime crisis, employing an event study analysis. In contrast to the public perception that nothing has happened, we find that financial...

In an influential paper, La Porta, Lopez-De-Silanes and Shleifer (2002) argued that public ownership of banks is associated with lower GDP growth. We show that this relationship does not hold for all countries, but depends on a country’s financial development and political institutions. Public...

Using industry-level data, this paper shows that the European transition region benefited much more strongly from financial integration in terms of economic growth than other developing countries in the years preceding the current crisis. We analyze several factors that may explain this finding:...