This Article considers the scope of the Federal Reserve's emergency loan-making powers and analyzes their use during the recent financial crisis. It argues that many of the Fed's responses to the crisis exceeded the bounds of its statutory authority.In unusual and exigent circumstances, § 13(3)...

After briefly reviewing the major changes in the financial structure as well as the focal events that characterized the 2007-2008 global financial crisis, this paper considers the evidence for the crucial role played by misaligned incentives. Presumably because compensation was predicated on...

We uncover a link between U.S. monetary policy and liquidity risk premia in stock markets around the world. Liquidity risk premia vary considerably over time and strongly co-move across countries. They are significantly lower when U.S. monetary policy tightens. A positive shock to the Federal...

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.

This new wave of financial innovations has broad implications for society, banking, and central banking: Digital platforms can ease entry for financial services providers, increase transactional efficiency, and widen access to and participation in the financial system. They could also decrease...

An unprecedented process of financial consolidation has taken place in the European Union over the past decade. Building on earlier US evidence, we examine the impact of strategic similarities between bidders and targets on post-merger financial performance. We find that, on average, bank...

The paper investigates small business lending as an information problem. It models the effects of information asymmetries within the bank combined with fixed wages. Two kinds of inefficiencies arise in equilibrium: the credit officer either sometimes shirks or he is occasionally fired. In both...

We study the effect of interbank market integration on small firm finance in the build-up to the 2007-2008 financial crisis. We use a comprehensive data set that contains contract terms on individual loans to 6,047 firms across 14 European countries between 1998:01 and 2005:12. We account for...

In this work, we trace and analyze the emergence of the crisis in the Bulgarian banking system as well as the behavior of the central bank and other macroeconomic institutions. The average annual rate of growth in the net profits of the commercial banks for the period 2002-2008 amounted to...

Central banks have run during the crisis a wide set of monetary policy interventions using new instruments and techniques to restore the monetary stability and thus re-establish the stability of financial (and banking) systems. We analyze the effect of monetary policy interventions on stock...