In January 2007 the International Monetary Fund (IMF) published, on an ad hoc basis, a series of financial soundness indicators (FSIs) based on a common methodology (the IMF compilation Guide) for 62 countries, including all 27 European Union countries. The European Central Bank (ECB), jointly...

This paper first highlights the structural features of shadow banking in the euro area, focussing on investment funds. It then discusses the potential systemic risks that the recent expansion of the investment fund sector presents. While investment funds provide important intermediation services...

The attention for the governance of financial sector supervisors is of a recent date. The debate has risen to the fore as part of the wider discussion about the appropriate institutional organization of financial supervision and the drive for compliance with international best practices in the...

This paper explores a potential application of the empirical growth-at-risk (GaR) approach to the assessment and design of macroprudential policies. In parallel to the concept of value-at-risk, the GaR of an economy over a given horizon is a low quantile of the distribution of the (projected)...

The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) framework used to identify global systemically important banks (G-SIBs) is based on banks' balance sheet information, leaving information derived from market data untapped. Among the most widely used market-based systemic risk measures, Adrian...

This occasional paper describes how the financial stability and macroprudential policy functions are organised at the ECB. Financial stability has been a key policy function of the ECB since its inception. Macroprudential policy tasks were later conferred on the ECB by the Single Supervisory...

The cost of equity for banks equates to the compensation that market participants demand for investing in and holding banks' equity, and has important implications for the transmission of monetary policy and for financial stability. Notwithstanding its importance, the cost of equity is...

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...

This paper reviews financial stability challenges in countries preparing for EU membership, i.e. Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo*, Iceland, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Turkey. The paper has been prepared by an expert group of staff from the European...

In response to the turmoil in global financial markets which began in the second half of 2007, central banks have changed the way in which they implement monetary policy. This has drawn particular attention to the type of collateral used for backing central banks’ temporary open market...