Bank holding companies (BHCs) invest in risky projects through bank entities or sell projects for a fee, thus engaging in shadow banking. BHCs can increase their fee income by guaranteeing sold projects with a recourse to the bank's balance sheet. When the expected guarantee repayments depend on...

Entry requires external finance, especially for less wealthy entrepreneurs, so poor investor protection limits competition. We model how incumbents lobby harder to block access to finance to entrants when politicians are less accountable to voters. In a broad cross-section of countries and...

This paper deals with the relation between excessive risk taking and capital structure in banks. Examining a quarterly dataset of U.S. banks between 1993 and 2010, we find that equity is valued higher when more risky portfolios are chosen when leverage is high, and that more risk taking has a...

We investigate actual capital chosen by banks in presence of capital minimum requirements and ex-post penalties for violating them. The model yields excess capital that is always positive and increases during times of distress in the economy, which is in line with empirical evidence. Next, we...

Interbank claims are a concern to regulators as they might facilitate the dissemination of defaults and generate spill-over effects. Building on a simple model, this paper introduces a measure of the spill-over effects that a bank generates when it defaults. The measure is based on an explicit...

With a sample of 354 U.S. large bank holding companies, this paper investigates the determination of financial distress in financial institutions. We find that: (1) the house price index is consistently significant and positively associated with the Distance-to-Default (DD) measure in the U.S....

Text presented at the 19ª Asamblea Anual del Grupo Regional de América Latina y el Caribe (GRULAC), of the World Savings Banks Institute, La Habana, Cuba, 4-5 November 2013. It mentions some of the more recent international reform initiatives in particular those linked to the Basel Committee...

This document describes the main issues of the New Basel Accord, highlights the roles and organization of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), and offers some arguments against some of the criticism that has been voiced against the...

The binary and multinomial logit models are applied for prediction of the Russian banks defaults (license withdrawals) using data from bank balance sheets and macroeconomic indicators. Significantly different models correspond to the two main grounds for license withdrawal: financial insolvency...

We investigate the effects of regulatory restrictions on the amounts invested in risky asset classes in life insurance funds across EU countries. By estimating a panel data econometric model, we find that these restrictions have an economically and statistically significant negative impact on...