Do credit ratings help enforce market discipline on banks? Analyzing a uniquely comprehensive dataset consisting of 1,081 rating change announcements for 154 international financial institutions between January 2004 and December 2015, we find that rating downgrades for internal reasons, such as...

We study the impact on bank merger activity of the strengthening in merger control legislation introduced in Europe between 1989 and 2004. We find that strengthening merger control increases the abnormal returns on bank target stocks in the days around the merger announcement by 7 percentage...

We study the impact of higher capital requirements on banks' balance sheets and its transmission to the real economy. The 2011 EBA capital exercise provides an almost ideal quasi-natural experiment, which allows us to identify the effect of higher capital requirements using a...

Banks are usually better informed on the loans they originate than other financial intermediaries. As a result, securitized loans might be of lower credit quality than otherwise similar nonsecuritized loans. We assess the effect of securitization activity on loans' relative credit quality...