The US banking industry offers a unique, natural and fertile environment to study geography's effects on banks' behavior and performance. The literature on banks' operating performance, while extensive, says little about the influence of spatial interactions on banks' performance. We compute and...

Using a unique data set based on US commercial banks and county level loan origination for the period 2005-2010, we measure whether banks that benefited from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) increase small business loan originations. We propose an identification strategy which exploits...

We analyze link between mortgage-related regulatory penalties levied on banks and the level of systemic risk in the U.S. banking industry. We employ a frequency decomposition of volatility spillovers (connectedness) to assess system-wide risk transmission with short-, medium-, and long-term...

When firms borrow in foreign currency but collect revenues in local currency, exchange rate changes can affect their ability to repay their debt. Using loan-level data from U.S. banks' regulatory filings, this paper studies the effect of exchange rate changes on firms’ loan payments. A 10...

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are important for employment and economic activity; however, they are perceived to lack adequate financing, which hampers their growth. As a consequence, governments have implemented a number of programs to foster SME lending and attention has focused on...

We examine the optimal size and composition of banks' total loss absorbing capacity (TLAC). Optimal size is driven by the trade-off between providing liquidity services through deposits and minimizing deadweight default costs. Optimal composition (equity vs. bail-in debt) is driven by the...

We investigate the relationship between bank complexity and bank risk-taking using German banking data over the period 2005-2017. We find that more complex banking organizations tend to take on more risk, but that this complexity-risk nexus decreases over time. We study how regulatory...

This paper extends the analysis of Junge and Kugler (2013) on the effects of increased capital requirements on Swiss GDP and obtains the following main results: First the Modigliani-Miller effect is robust with respect to a substantial extension of the data base and yields an offset of capital...

This paper investigates whether European banks have capital targets and how deviations from the target impact their equity composition and activity mix. Using quarterly data for a sample of large European banks between 2004 and 2011, we show that there are notable asymmetries in banks' reactions...

We propose a methodology for measuring the market-implied capital of banks by subtracting from the market value of equity (market capitalization) a credit-spread-based correction for the value of shareholders' default option. We show that without such a correction, the estimated impact of a...