This paper measures the connectedness in European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) sovereign and bank CDS between April 2008 and December 2014, in order to understand the transmission of stress during the euro crisis. To this end, we perform a connectedness analysis using the framework proposed...

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...

In summer 2011, elevated sovereign risk in Eurozone peripheral countries increased the solvency risk of Eurozone banks, precipitating a run on their short-term debt. We assess the effectiveness of different European Central Bank (ECB) interventions that followed – lender of last resort vs....

We analyse the relationship between tail risk and crisis measures by governments and the central bank. Using an adjusted Merton model in a game theoretical set-up, the analysis shows that the participation constraint for interventions by the central bank and the governments is less binding if...

This paper studies the effects of ECB communications about unconventional monetary policy operations on the perceived sovereign risk of Italy over the last five years. More than fifty events concerning non-standard operations are identified and classified with respect to the specific ECB...

We study the dynamics of sovereign risk spillovers from (and between) Spain and Italy, before and after the ECB's announcement of the OMT program. We identify domestic Italian and Spanish sovereign risk shocks through an intraday event study. The shocks are used as external instruments in...

We study determinants of sovereign portfolios of Spanish banks over a long time-span, starting in 2008. Our findings challenge the view that banks engaged in moral hazard strategies to exploit the regulatory treatment of sovereign exposures. In particular, we show that being a weakly capitalized...

To study the presence of a risk-taking channel in the US, we build a comprehensive dataset from the syndicated corporate loan market and measure monetary policy using different measures, most notably Taylor (1993) and Romer and Romer (2004) residuals. We identify a negative relation between...

How far should capital requirements be raised in order to ensure a strong and resilient banking system without imposing undue costs on the real economy? Capital requirement increases make banks safer and are beneficial in the long run but carry transition costs because their imposition reduces...

If monetary policy is to aim at financial stability, how would it change? To analyze this question, this paper develops a general-form, axiomatic framework. Financial stability objectives are shown to make a monetary authority more conservative and more aggressive. Conservative as it sets higher...