The European Central Bank (ECB) increased the emergency liquidity assistance (ELA) for Greek banks from €50 billion in February 2015 to approximately €90 billion in June 2015. Its actions were accompanied by a discussion among academics, politicians and practitioners regarding the legitimacy...

The European Central Bank (ECB) recently became engaged in macro-prudential policies and the micro-prudential supervision of the largest Euro area banks. These new tasks should help complete financial integration, and make the Euro area more resilient to financial instability risks. However, the...

I analyze the optimal design of banking supervision in the presence of cross-border lending. Cross-border lending could imply that an individual bank failure in one country could trigger negative spillover effects in another country. Such cross-border contagion effects could turn out to be...

On 3 December EY hosted a SUERF conference on banking reform with Sir Howard Davies, the Chairman of RBS, and Dame Colette Bowe, the Chairman of the Banking Standards Board, as the two keynote speakers. Professor David Miles (Imperial College) gave the SUERF 2015 Annual Lecture on Capital and...

This policy letter provides an overview of the strengths, weaknesses, risks and opportunities of the upcoming comprehensive risk assessment, a euro area-wide evaluation of bank balance sheets and business models. If carried out properly, the 2014 comprehensive assessment will lead the euro area...

The current economic policy discussion on financial integration in the European Union concentrates on cross-border mergers. We study the impact of cross-border lending in a theoretical model where banks acquire either hard or soft information on borrowing firms and predict that the closer firms...

Using a difference-in-differences approach and relying on conftdential supervisory data and an unique proprietary data set available at the European Central Bank related to the 2016 EU-wide stress test, this paper presents novel empirical evidence that supervisory scrutiny associated to stress...

We study the impact of ECB's supervisory announcements on the Bank Stock index, from 2013 through 2017. Our evidence shows that the news, related to supervisory actions, do have highly significant effects on the market price of banks, contributing to the volatility of the Bank Stock Index for...

Banking regulation and supervision have a key role to play in realising the EU’s climate change objectives. In this article we analyse the EU-level initiatives currently underway to green the banking system, in particular with regard to the microprudential rulebook. We document how regulators...