Although a large series of papers have been concerned with macroeconomic issues such as price stability or employment, very few studies have discussed the impact of the euro on the competitive structure of European banking markets. Two questions are being addressed in this paper: How does the...

This paper offers two new explanations for banks' home bias in government bond holdings: a sovereign-based rating cap on corporates and the existence of a ‘bank tax'. These are complementary to the four explanations offered in the literature: risk shifting, gambling for resurrection, moral...

The bank literature has documented theoretical and empirical evidence of a “diabolic loop” in the sovereign-bank nexus. Banks have a concentrated risk exposure in domestic government bonds. In the European banking union, this has led to a proposal to create European safe bonds (ESBies)....

Following the global financial crisis of 2008, a new architecture for global financial markets has emerged. It aims to sever the link between bank losses, state aid and sovereign risk, and put an end to the doctrine of “too-big-to fail” and moral hazard thanks to the privatization of losses....