Regulation may impact on financial risk taking by financial intermediaries by way of the decision-making process envisaged in the various possible legal structures set forth by the law. In Europe there are three different possible board structures: the one-tier board system, typical of the UK,...

I test the market discipline of bank risk hypothesis by examining whether banks choose risk management policies that account for the risk preferences of subordinated debtholders. Using around 500,000 quarterly observations on the population of U.S. insured commercial banks over the 1995-2009...

We show that any objective risk measurement algorithm mandated by central banks for regulated financial entities will result in more risk being taken on by those financial entities than would otherwise be the case. Furthermore, the risks taken on by the regulated financial entities are far more...

The paper studies risk mitigation associated with capital regulation, in a context where banks may choose tail risk assets. We show that this undermines the traditional result that higher capital reduces excess risk-taking driven by limited liability. Moreover, higher capital may have an...

Switzerland has a systemically important financial sector. This paper analyzes the financial soundness and risk dynamics of Swiss banks and insurance companies for the past five years. The cross-country comparisons show that despite the recovery in profitability and capital for banks and...

The paper tests the effect of competition on bank risk-taking for a sample of up to 800 banks worldwide over the period 1995-2010. Following the theoretical literature on bank competition and risk more closely than previous empirical research, we measure competition at the bank level and...

Policy makers are contemplating restrictions on the shorting of government, including a ban on the (naked) short-selling of government bonds, and derivatives related to those bonds. Sovereign issuers and primary dealers have expressed their unease about the potentially adverse impact, or...

Many studies have questioned the reliability of banks' calculations of risk-weighted assets (RWA) for prudential purposes. The significant divergences found at international level are taken as indicating excessive subjectivity in the current rules governing banks' risk measurement and capital...

This paper proposes and evaluates several market-based measures for US and eurozone individual bank tail risk and banking system risk. We apply statistical extreme value analysis to the tails of bank equity prices to estimate the likelihood of individual institutions financial distress as well...