This paper studies how banks' balance sheets and funding costs interact in the transmission of monetary-policy rates to banks' credit supply to firms. To do so, we use creditregistry data from Germany and Portugal together with the European Central Bank's policy-rate cuts in mid-2014. The...

Understanding why some firms default, while others do not, is an important issue for the assessment of financial stability. In this domain, it may be interesting to understand if credit risk is driven mostly by idiosyncratic firm characteristics or by systematic factors, which simultaneously...

It is well established that when monetary policy is accommodative, banks grant more credit. However, only recently has the quality of credit granted been given attention. This literature on the so-called risk-taking channel of monetary policy has been growing quickly, leading to scattered...

The success of deposit insurance arrangements at eliminating bank runs is likely closely tied to their credibility. We investigate this hypothesis building on two episodes which tested the insurance protection offered by the Portuguese arrangement in the midst of the country's sovereign debt...

Bank complexity is often associated with risk, due to moral hazard and agency problems. At the same time, complexity may be linked to diversification and scale economies, thus leading to less risk. In this paper, we provide empirical evidence on the relationship between bank complexity and...

Banks individually optimize their liquidity risk management, often neglecting the externalities generated by their choices on the overall risk of the financial system. This is the main argument to support the regulation of liquidity risk. However, banks may have incentives to optimize their...

When banks are hit by a severe liquidity shock, central banks have a key role as lenders of last resort. Despite the well-established importance of this mechanism, it is challenging to analyze empirically this key role of central banks. We explore a unique setting in which banks suddenly lost...

We study local loan conditions when, under external pressure, banks close branches. After the closure of nearby branches of their credit granting banks, firms that locally and hurriedly transfer to other banks receive an equivalent interest rate. However, and in stark contrast, where branch...

Banking crises are rare events, however when they occur they often have dramatic consequences. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the toolkit of early warning models available to policy makers by exploring the dynamics and non-linearities embedded in a panel dataset covering several...