Euro area governments have committed to break the doom loop between bank risk and sovereign risk. But policymakers have not reached consensus on whether and how to reform the regulatory treatment of banks' sovereign exposures. To inform policy discussions, this paper simulates portfolio...

Macroprudential policy is a relatively new policy field. Its goal is to preserve financial stability and to prevent the build-up of systemic risk that may have adverse effects for the functioning of the financial system and for the real economy. New institutions have been tasked with the...

This paper contrasts the investment behavior of different financial institutions in debt securities as a response to past returns. For identification, I use unique security-level data from the German Micro-database Securities Holdings Statistics. Banks and investment funds respond in a...

I examine the relevance of contagion in explaining financial distress in the US banking system by identifying the component of bank level probabilities that is due to contagion. Identification is achieved after controlling for macrofinancial and bank specific shocks that have similar...

Over the last few years, national macroprudential authorities have developed different strategies for setting the countercyclical capital buffer (CCyB) rate in the banking sector. The existing approaches are based on various indicators used to identify the current phase of the financial cycle....

This paper characterizes the optimal banking union with endogenous participation in a two-country economy in which domestic bank failures may be contemporaneous to sovereign crises, giving rise to risk-sharing motives to mutualize the funding of bail-outs. Raising public funds to conduct a...

Financial networks are an important source of systemic risk, but often only partial network information is available. In this paper, we use data on bank-firm credit relationships in Japan and conduct a horse race between different network reconstruction methods in terms of their ability to...

We study determinants of sovereign portfolios of Spanish banks over a long time-span, starting in 2008. Our findings challenge the view that banks engaged in moral hazard strategies to exploit the regulatory treatment of sovereign exposures. In particular, we show that being a weakly capitalized...

Recent policy discussion includes the introduction of diversification requirements for sovereign bond portfolios of European banks. In this paper, we evaluate the possible effects of these constraints on risk and diversification in the sovereign bond portfolios of the major European banks....

The paper evaluates the impact of macroprudential capital regulation on bank capital, risk taking behaviour, and solvency. The identification relies on the policy change in bank-level capital requirements across systemically important banks in Europe. A one percentage point hike in capital...