The rising delinquencies in the U.S. subprime mortgage market in 2006 and the succeeding collapse in housing prices had a considerably negative impact on the functioning of the European financial systems and the smooth operation of European economies. Indeed, in the Euro-area, what started as a...

The Global Financial Crisis unleashed changes in the operating and regulatory environments for large international banks. This paper proposes a novel taxonomy to identify and track business model evolution for the 30 Global Systemically Important Banks (G-SIBs). Drawing from banks' reporting, it...

On 5-6 September 2012 SUERF held its 30th Colloquium “States, Banks, and the Financing of the Economy” at the University of Zürich, Switzerland. The papers included in this SUERF Study are based on contributions to the Colloquium. All the papers in this publication discuss from different...

On 5-6 September 2012 SUERF held its 30th Colloquium "States, Banks, and the Financing of the Economy" at the University of Zürich, Switzerland. The papers included in this SUERF Study are based on contributions to the Colloquium. All the chapters in this publication discuss from different...

We analyze shareholders' incentives to change the leverage of a firm that has already borrowed substantially. As a result of debt overhang, shareholders have incentives to resist reductions in leverage that make the remaining debt safer. This resistance is present even without any government...

In April 2022, the Bank of Canada announced that it would continue to use a floor system to implement monetary policy by providing a sufficiently large quantity of settlement balances to enable the overnight repo rate to trade at close to the deposit rate. In contrast, the Bank's guiding...

The financial systems of some countries fared materially better than others during the global financial crisis of 2007-09. The performance of the Canadian banking system during this period was relatively strong. Using a case study approach together with empirical analysis, we assess some of the...

We examine the pervasive view that "equity is expensive" which leads to claims that high capital requirements are costly for society and would affect credit markets adversely. We find that arguments made to support this view are fallacious, irrelevant to the policy debate by confusing private...

This paper assesses the merits of countercyclical bank balance sheet regulation for the stabilization of financial and economic cycles and examines its interaction with monetary policy. The framework used is a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with banks and bank capital, in which...

In October 2006, Dominion Bond Rating Service (DBRS) introduced new ratings for banks that account for the potential of government support. The rating changes are not a reflection of any changes in the respective banks' credit fundamentals. We use this natural experiment to evaluate the...