This paper discusses the incentive conflicts that arise in banking supervision in the EU in a principal-agent framework, where the regulator is the agent and the taxpayers is the principal. The regulatory agent in addition to maintaining financial stability (the objective of the principal) may...

We model the impact of bank mergers on loan competition, reserve holdings and aggregate liquidity. A merger changes the distribution of liquidity shocks and creates an internal money market, leading to financial cost efficiencies and more precise estimates of liquidity needs. The merged banks...

Based on a unique dataset of legislative changes in industrial countries, we identify events that strengthen the competition control of mergers and acquisitions, analyze their impact on banks and non-financial firms and explain the different reactions observed with specific regulatory...

Modern bank management comprises both classical lending business and transfer of asset risk to capital markets through securitization. Sound knowledge of the risks involved in securitization transactions is a prerequisite for solid risk management. This paper aims to resolve a part of the...

Traditionally, aggregate liquidity shocks are modelled as exogenous events. Extending our previous work (Cao & Illing, 2007), this paper analyses the adequate policy response to endogenous systemic liquidity risk. We analyse the feedback between lender of last resort policy and incentives of...

Stress testing has become a crucial point on the Basel II agenda, mainly as Pillar I estimates do not explicitly take portfolio concentration into account. We start from the credit portfolio of the German pension insurer being a cross-sectional representation of the German economy and...

The Italian and German banking systems shared similar characteristics early in the 1990s but have evolved in different directions since then: Italy privatized its publicly-owned banks while Germany has maintained a large share of state-owned savings banks. Contemporaneously, banks in both...

This paper examines the potential distortion of prices in the CDS market caused by too-big-to-fail. Overall, we find evidence for market discipline in the CDS market. However, CDS prices are distorted due to a size effect which arises when investors expect a public bail-out as a result of...

Using aggregate balance sheet data from banks across the EU-25 over the period from 1997 to 2005 this paper provides empirical evidence that national banking market concentration has a negative impact on European banks' financial soundness as measured by the Z-score technique while controlling...

Based on detailed regulatory intervention data among German banks during 1994-2008, we test if supervisory measures affect the likelihood and the timing of bank recovery. Severe regulatory measures increase both the likelihood of recovery and its duration while weak measures are insignificant....