In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the Financial Stability Board (FSB) and the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) created a list of systemically important financial institutions (SIFIs) with the intention of determining which financial institutions were important enough to the...

The feedback loop between sovereign and financial sector insolvency has been identified as a key driver of the European debt crisis and has motivated an array of policy proposals. We revisit this "doom loop" focusing on governments' incentives to default. To this end, we present a simple...

This paper examines the spillover effects of sovereign rating news on European financial markets during the period 2007-2010. Our main finding is that sovereign rating downgrades have statistically and economically significant spillover effects both across countries and financial markets. The...