On September 3-4, 2009 SUERF and Utrecht University School of Economicsorganized the Colloquium "The Quest for Stability" in Utrecht, the Netherlands. The papers included in this SUERF Study are based on contributions to the Colloquium.

The present study is centered primarily on determining whether the German banking system is to be characterized by procyclical behavior from 2000 to 2011 and to what extent specific sectors of the German banking system showed significant balance sheet operations to increase their leverage within...

In this study, we propose our hypothesis that the distinguishable principal-agent relationships of German banks are significantly influencing the risk-taking attitudes of bank managers. Particularly, we intend to substantiate the theory that banks owned by dispersed shareholders or federal state...

The literature on short selling restrictions focuses mainly on a ban's impact on market efficiency, liquidity and overpricing. Surprisingly, little is known about the effects of short selling restrictions on institutional investors' trading behavior.Since institutional investors dominate mature...

In this paper, we investigate short sale constraints' impact on the incidence of extreme stock market movements. The latter can be used to proxy for the likelihood of tail events like crashes and bubbles in a market and, thus, is a crucial measure of stock market stability. Since crashes and...

Short sellers are routinely blamed for destabilizing stock markets by exacerbating deviations from fundamental values. In response, regulators periodically impose short sale constraints aimed at preventing excessive stock market declines. One explanation is that policy makers regard short...

We investigate the stock market crashes in China, Iceland, and the US in the 2007-2009 period. The bond stock earnings yield difference model is used as a prediction tool. Historically, when the measure is too high, meaning that long bond interest rates are too high relative to the trailing...

This paper examines what institutional and bank-specific factors determine bank stock price synchronicity. Using data on 37 countries from 1996–2007, we find that bank stocks are more aligned with the whole market during the financial crisis; in countries that have more credit provided by...

Do financial development, domestic interest rates, and interest-rate differentials simultaneously affect the underpricing of initial public offerings (IPOs) in emerging market countries? Using a sample of 187 IPOs in Thailand between 2000 and 2012, I show that financial development, stock market...

During the recent financial crisis, numerous EU officials, market participants and the media suggested that irrational herding was a key factor for the financial turmoil and the soaring yield spreads. In this paper we test for evidence of herd behavior in European government bond prices and,...