Traditionally, regulation of banks has focused on the riskentailed in bank loans. Loans are typically nontradedassets. In recent years, another component of bank assetshas become increasingly important: assets actively tradedin the financial markets.1 These assets form the “tradingbook” of a...

We examine the lending behaviour of small and large banks in the Eurozone during the sovereign debt crisis. Relative to large banks, small banks are less pro-cyclical in that they exhibit more stable lending growth across credit expansion and contraction periods. In peripheral countries, the...

In this paper we analyse firm level systemic risk for US and European banks from 2004 to 2012. We observe that common systemic risk indicators are primarily driven by firm size which implies an overriding concern for “too-big-to-fail” institutions. However, smaller banks may still pose...

Using a sample of US bank mergers from 1995 to 2012, we observe that the pre-post merger changes in CEO bonus are significantly negatively related to the strength of corporate governance within the bidding bank. This suggests that bonus compensation is not consistent with the “optimal...

We investigate the impact of banking competition on corporate credit risk. Although banking competition does not, on average, affect corporate bankruptcy rates, we find that it causes corporate bankruptcies to increase significantly for high-leverage firms. This effect lasts up to eight years...