Drawing on the 2016 update of the IMF's Central Bank Legislation Database, this paper examines differences in central bank legal frameworks before and after the Global Financial Crisis. Examples from select countries show that many central bank laws have undergone changes in objectives,...

Governments in the EU frequently bail out firms in distress by granting state aid. I use data from 86 cases during the years 1995-2003 to examine two issues: the impact of bailouts on bankruptcy probability and the determinants of bailout policy. I have three main results. First, the estimated...

This article argues that there is a fundamental mismatch between the nature of finance and current approaches to financial regulation. Today's financial system is a dynamic and complex ecosystem. For these and other reasons, policy makers and market actors regularly have only a fraction of the...

In August 2007 the United Kingdom experienced its first bank run in over 140 years. Although Northern Rock was not a particularly large bank (it was at the time ranked 7th in terms of assets) it was nevertheless a significant retail bank and a substantial mortgage lender. In fact, ten years...

At the beginning of the recent financial crisis, sponsoring banks rescued their structured investment vehicles (SIVs) despite having no contractual obligation to do so. I show that this outcome may arise as the equilibrium of a signaling game between banks and their debt investors when a...

On 16th November 2009, SUERF, CEPS and the Belgian Financial Forum coorganized a conference "Crisis management at cross-roads" in Brussels. All papers in the present volume are based on contributions at the conference and the SUERF Annual Lecture which followed the event.

In the post-financial crisis regulatory reforms emphasis has been placed on creating recovery and resolution frameworks for banks, which ensure that the costs of failure are primarily born by shareholders, instead of taxpayers and the wider economy. Supervisors have (or will have) extensive...

This paper studies the specificities of the regulation of shadow banking in the EU. It argues that the idiosyncratic features of the EU shadow banking sector call for a different (or indigenized) regulatory approach from that of the U.S. It highlights striking differences between the EU and the...

This paper traces the roots of collateral flow and its potential vulnerabilities in the shadow banking system to their regulatory capital treatment in the banking sector. As part of assessing the interaction of banking regulation and the shadow banking sector, it investigates the impact of bank...