This paper contributes to the empirical literature on risk shifting. It proposes a method to find out whether risk shifting is present in the banking industry and, if so, what type. The type of risk shifting depends on the group of debt holders to whom risk is shifted. We apply this method to...

In the crisis that started in 2007, banks’ off-balance sheet activity has been blamed for flooding the market with low-quality assets and contributing to spreading risk throughout the economic system. Nevertheless, this view is hardly sustainable within the context of sophisticated markets....

This paper analyzes whether risk shifting took place in the European Union’s banking sector in 2002–2009. We also identify the type of risk shifting, if any, in the sample. In addition, our method provides a way to determine which variables incentivize/disincentivize risk shifting. Our main...

In this paper we extend the efficiency cross-country comparisons to ten European countries in order to know how different or similar current banking performances are. We start with two types of comparisons. First of all, we evaluate the average technical efficiency of each country by means of a...

In a "Hayekian world," the market is a competitive exchange network that continuously solves a coordination problem. In this competitive context, expectations are endogenous, so planned actions are assumed to be mostly realizable. Nevertheless, economic crises are possible: not even...

type="main" xml:id="sjpe12037-abs-0001" <title type="main">Abstract</title> <p>This study discusses informal hiring in terms of a standard principal–agent model. We have developed an adverse selection model of the labour market where effort is not contractible and employers have the opportunity to use informal search...</p>

The paper investigates the operating efficiency differences of a sample of commercial banks across 10 European countries. First, the paper analyzes the technical efficiency of each country sample following the “basic” Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) model incorporating only banking...