This paper presents a coherent framework for identifying Systemically Important Financial Institutions (SIFI) and assessing the overall banking system's vulnerability to systemic phenomena from the viewpoint of banking system as a complex network of interconnected nodes generating pair-wise...

The trade-off between bank competition and financial stability has always been a widely and controversial issue, both among policymakers and academics. This paper empirically re-investigates the relationship between competition and bank risk across a sample of 54 European listed banks over the...

We propose a new theory of systemic risk based on Knightian uncertainty (or "ambiguity"). We show that, due to uncertainty aversion, beliefs on future asset returns are endogenous, and bad news on one asset class induces investors to be more pessimistic about other asset classes as well. This...

This is a chapter for a forthcoming volume Oxford Handbook of Financial Regulation (Oxford University Press 2014) (eds. Eilís Ferran, Niamh Moloney, and Jennifer Payne). It provides an overview of EU financial regulation from the first banking directive up until its most recent developments in...

Using a novel cross-European dataset on bank internationalization, the paper accounts for both organizational and geographic complexity and evaluates its impact on systemic risk and how both the 2008–09 global financial crisis and the 2010–11 European sovereign debt crisis might have...

This paper introduces a two-step strategy, the synthetic control method combined with the difference-in-differences method, to evaluate the effectiveness of the Dodd-Frank Act (DFA). We find no evidence from our counterfactual analysis in support of the DFA reducing systemic risk in the US...

We study insolvency cascades in an interbank system when banks are allowed to insure their loans with credit default swaps (CDS) sold by other banks. We show that, by properly shifting financial exposures from one institution to another, a CDS market can be designed to rewire the network of...

This paper investigates how countries' micro-prudential regulatory regimes are related to banks' systemic risk. We use a bank-level systemic risk indicator that can be decomposed into a bank's individual risk and its systemic linkage. To proxy the strictness of a country's regulatory regime, we...

Post-crisis reforms aim to mitigate the systemic risks that arise from global systemically important banks (G-SIBs). Based on our estimates of G-SIBs' probability of distress, we find that their resilience has improved in recent years on the back of higher capital ratios. Furthermore, by...

Should bank managers be liable for taking excessive risks? The paper cautions that manager liability has very little promise as a safeguard for financial stability. In support of this claim, a twofold argument is made: First, neither prudential regulation nor the general duty of care provide...