An important policy goal in European Union has been integration of markets and economic convergence. The aim of this exploratory paper is to study pricing of currency exchange services based on bid-ask spreads in commercial banks and the policy implications of the delayed integration of banking...

This paper examines the implications that alternative regulatory structures may have for resolving failed banking institutions. We place our emphasis on the European Union (EU), which is both economically and financially large and has several features relating to cross-border banking in the form...

The European banking industry joined forces to achieve a fully integrated market for retail payment services in the euro area: the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA). Against this background, the present paper examines the fundamental relationship between retail payment business and overall bank...

We provide an estimate of the size of the shadow banking sector in Europe. We compare it to the shadow banking sector in the U.S. and discuss potential extensions and open issues related to data availability as well as the inclusion of aspects of hedge funds activities and exchange-traded funds....

This paper documents a new type of cross-border bank lending channel. The deepening of the European sovereign debt crisis in 2011 restrained the financial intermediation of European banks in the United States. In this period, some of the U.S. branches of European banks faced a dollar liquidity...

This paper documents a new type of cross-border bank lending channel using a novel dataset on the balance sheets of U.S. branches of foreign banks and their syndicated loans. We show that: (1) The U.S. branches of euro-area banks suffered a liquidity shock in the form of reduced access to large...

The Great Recession of 2007-2009 piqued the interest of policymakers worldwide, prompting various initiatives to stabilize the financial system and advance financial inclusion. However, few studies have considered their interconnectedness or whether any synergies or trade-offs exist between...

Using proprietary data on banks' monthly securities holdings, we show that during the European sovereign debt crisis, domestic banks in fiscally stressed countries were considerably more likely than foreign banks to increase their holdings of domestic sovereign bonds during months when the...

Sovereign debt crisis, domestic banks in fiscally stressed countries were considerably more likely than foreign banks to increase their holdings of domestic sovereign bonds in months with relatively high domestic sovereign bond issuance. This effect is stronger for state‐owned banks and for...

In this paper, we survey the nascent literature on the transmission of negative policy rates. We discuss the theory of how the transmission depends on bank balance sheets, and how this changes once policy rates become negative. We review the growing evidence that negative policy rates are...