The admission by the Greek government on October 18, 2009, of large-scale accounting fraud in its national accounts sparked an unprecedented sovereign debt crisis that rapidly spread to the Euro-Zone's weakest member states. As the crisis increasingly drove a wedge between a seemingly resilient...

We provide empirical evidence of the causal effects of changes in financial intermediaries' net worth on the aggregate economy. Our strategy identifies financial shocks as high-frequency changes in the market value of intermediaries' net worth in a narrow window around their earnings...

The failure of Lehman Brothers highlighted the severe lapses in risk management and regulatory oversight that brought on and intensified the global financial crisis. This paper presents a structural credit risk model that provides useful early warning signals that regulators could have used to...

The breakdown of the interbank money markets in the face of the recent financial crisis has forced central banks and governments to take extraordinary measures to sustain financial stability. In this paper we investigate which influence central bank activity has on interbank markets. In our...

This paper exploits a novel bank-level monthly dataset to assess the effects of global liquidity on the global flows of euro area banks. The period associated with the European sovereign debt crisis has witnessed increased growth in euro area bank claims on extra-euro area residents, against a...

This empirical study examines the stability of Islamic banks during the subprime crisis. It covers a sample of fourteen Islamic banks and fourteen conventional banks. The conditional variance (volatility) of returns was used to measure stability. The E-GARCH and GJR-GARCH asymmetric models were...

This paper addresses the question of whether and how easy monetary policy may lead to excesses in financial and real asset markets and ultimately result in financial dislocation. It presents evidence suggesting that periods when short-term interest rates were persistently and significantly below...

This theoretical model analyzes the impact of interbank credit market dynamics on the resilience of the financial system. Based on a stochastic model of interbank market credit flows, lending in the interbank market is restricted by the availability of liquidity. Following a shock...

On 16th November 2009, SUERF, CEPS and the Belgian Financial Forum coorganized a conference "Crisis management at cross-roads" in Brussels. All papers in the present volume are based on contributions at the conference and the SUERF Annual Lecture which followed the event.