The extraordinary steps taken by governments during the 2007-2009 financial crisis to prevent the failure of large financial institutions and support credit availability have invited heated debate. This paper comprehensively reviews empirical assessments of the benefits of those programs-such as...

In June 2014 the ECB became the first major central bank to lower one of its key policy rates to negative territory. The theoretical and empirical literature is silent on whether banks' reaction would be different when the policy rate is lowered to negative levels compared to a standard reaction...

This paper uses a unique experiment conducted as part of the Investment Survey of the European Investment Bank (EIB) to provide novel evidence on firms' preferences over loan characteristics and the relation between terms of credit and investment decisions. The design of the experiment allows...

This paper examines whether the low interest rate environment that has prevailed since the Great Recession has compelled banks to reach for yield. It is important to recognize that banks can take on a variety of risks that offer higher yields today but incur different forms of future losses....

In the context of the German regional government bond market, this paper studies the hypothesis that governments use moral suasion to persuade home government-owned banks to hold more home government debt. The empirical approach makes use of German banks' ownership structure, heterogeneity in...

We investigate the structural dependencies in the bank-firm credit market of Spain under a multilayer network perspective. In particular, the original bipartite network is decomposed into different layers representing different industrial sectors. We then study the correlations between layers...

In attempting to promote bank stability, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (2006) provides a framework that seeks to control the amount of tail risk that large banks take in their trading books. However, banks around the world suffered sizeable trading losses during the recent crisis....

This paper examines the international credit portfolios of German banks. We construct a bank-country panel from a unique dataset for a representative set of countries and ask why banks leave diversification opportunities unexploited in some countries. Controlling for bank heterogeneity, we...

Banks increasingly recognize the need to measure and manage the credit risk of their loans on a portfolio basis. We address the subportfolio middle market. Due to their specific lending policy for this market segment it is an important task for banks to systematically identify regional and...

The macroprudential regulatory framework of Basel III imposes the same capital and liquidity requirements on all banks around the world to ensure global competitiveness of banks. Using an agent-based model of the financial system, we find that this is not a robust framework to achieve...