The European Central Bank (ECB) recently became engaged in macro-prudential policies and the micro-prudential supervision of the largest Euro area banks. These new tasks should help complete financial integration, and make the Euro area more resilient to financial instability risks. However, the...

I analyze the optimal design of banking supervision in the presence of cross-border lending. Cross-border lending could imply that an individual bank failure in one country could trigger negative spillover effects in another country. Such cross-border contagion effects could turn out to be...

This policy letter provides an overview of the strengths, weaknesses, risks and opportunities of the upcoming comprehensive risk assessment, a euro area-wide evaluation of bank balance sheets and business models. If carried out properly, the 2014 comprehensive assessment will lead the euro area...

The current economic policy discussion on financial integration in the European Union concentrates on cross-border mergers. We study the impact of cross-border lending in a theoretical model where banks acquire either hard or soft information on borrowing firms and predict that the closer firms...

Using a difference-in-differences approach and relying on conftdential supervisory data and an unique proprietary data set available at the European Central Bank related to the 2016 EU-wide stress test, this paper presents novel empirical evidence that supervisory scrutiny associated to stress...