This paper examines empirically the role of bank market power as an internal factor influencing banks’ reaction in terms of lending and risk taking to monetary policy impulses. The analysis is carried out for the U.S. and euro-area banking sectors over the period 1997–2010. Market power is...

Bank reserves in the United States increased dramatically at the end of 2008. Subsequent asset purchase programs in 2009 and 2011 more than doubled the quantity of reserves outstanding. We study the cross-sectional distribution of reserves in that period, and the relationship between holdings of...

Efforts in the United States to promote bank liquidity through reserve requirements, a minimum ratio of liquid assets relative to liabilities, extend as far back as 1837. Despite such requirements, banking panics and suspensions of deposit convertibility continued to occur. Eventually,...

We construct a model where risk shifting can be moderated by capital requirements. Imperfect information about the level of capital per unit of risk, however, introduces uncertainty about the risk exposure of intermediaries. Over-estimation of the capital held by financial intermediaries, or the...

Italy has experienced a restructuring and consolidation process in the banking industry since the 1990s’ that is expected to foster efficiency and competition. Despite the reforms, a peculiarity of the industry is the persistence of small mutual-cooperative banks (BCCs) active in narrowed...

This paper analyzes whether risk shifting took place in the European Union’s banking sector in 2002–2009. We also identify the type of risk shifting, if any, in the sample. In addition, our method provides a way to determine which variables incentivize/disincentivize risk shifting. Our main...

This paper uses dynamic panel estimation approaches to investigate the relationship between shareholder value and efficiency for a large sample of commercial banks in 14 Asia-Pacific economies between 2003 and 2010. In general, the results indicate that shareholder value is positively linked to...

This paper explores whether the level of de facto financial integration of banks in a country increases the incidence of systemic banking crises. The paper computes a measure of financial integration based on network statistics of banks participating in the global market of inter-bank syndicated...

I explore an alternative mortgage contract that limits negative equity by tying outstanding debt to an index of house prices. This is done in an incomplete markets model, that is calibrated to match US micro- and macro-data. I find that switching from a non-recourse contract to an indexed...

This paper investigates whether the initiation of trading in credit default swaps (CDSs) on a borrowing firm׳s outstanding debt is associated with a decline in that firm׳s reporting conservatism. CDS investments can modify lenders׳ payoffs on their loan portfolios by providing insurance on...