Business cycles imply liquidity risks for banks. This paper explores how these risks influence bank lending over the cycle. With forward-looking banks, lending cycles, credit booms and busts, or suppressed and highly fragile bank systems can emerge, depending on the magnitude of liquidity risks....

Does the mere presence of big banks affect macroeconomic outcomes? Gabaix (2011) shows that idosyncratic shocks can have aggregate effects if the distribution of firm sizes in manufacturing follows a power law distribution. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we expand the theory of granularity...

The ex ante theory of collateral states that better informed lenders, such as informal lenders, rely less on collateral. We test this by contrasting the use of collateral between formal and informal lenders in the same market. Indeed, formal lenders rely more often on collateral, controlling for...

This paper studies regulatory competition in the banking sector in a model where banks are heterogeneous and taxpayers come up for the losses of failing banks. Capital requirements force the weakest banks to exit the market. This gives rise to a signalling effect of capital standards, as...

The industrial organization approach to banking is extended to analyze the effects of interbank market activity and regulatory liquidity requirements on bank behavior. A multi-stage decision situation allows for considering the interaction between credit risk and liquidity risk of banks. This...

The internal organization of global banks potentially plays a vital role in the transmission of shocks both within and across borders. The analysis of this transmission is of importance for regulators and policy makers. In this paper, we investigate how solvency and wholesale funding shocks to...

Model-based capital regulation is considered to be one of the key innovations of Basel II. The objective of this innovation was to make capital charges more sensitive to risk. Using data from the German credit register, and employing a difference-indifference identification strategy, we...

The massive decline in international trade in 2008/09 is often attributed to the global deterioration in financial conditions after the bankruptcy of a US investment bank, Lehman Brothers. This paper examines the association between external finance and firm activity in Germany in more detail....

We analyze the relationship between firm-specific shocks and aggregate fluctuations. In particular, profitability of firms affected by a negative shock worsens. To the extent that the banks cannot distinguish between aggregate and firm-specific profitability shocks, they will adjust interest...