Few, if any, of the macro stress tests undertaken before the current crisis uncovered significant vulnerabilities. This article examines the reasons for the poor performance by comparing the outcomes of simple stress tests with actual events for a large sample of historical banking crises. The...

In this paper we show that deposit insurance can increase the probability of systemic banking crisis, even though it is optimally designed and its premium is risk related. This is driven by the possibility of contagious bank runs. We prove that contagion only occurs if the correlation between...

This paper provides some general lessons for the design of counter-cyclical capital buffers. Its main empirical contribution is to analyze conditioning variables which could guide the build-up and release of capital. A major distinction for counter-cyclical capital schemes is whether...