The European Union's Capital Markets Union (CMU) is a broadly-based regulatory reforms framework that emerged from the Global Financial Crisis, the Great Recession and the Eurozone Sovereign Debt Crisis of 2008-2014. Launched in 2015, the CMU deployment date is set for 2019, although some...

Basel framework for bank's capital adequacy has been criticized for its over reliance on external credit rating agencies. Moreover, implementation of Minimum Capital Requirement (MCR) under Basel-III is often linked to a decrease in economic growth as it requires banks to maintain a higher...

We characterize policy interventions directed to minimize the cost to the deposit guarantee scheme and the taxpayers of banks with legacy problems. Non-performing loans (NPLs) with low and risky returns create a debt overhang that induces bank owners to forego profitable lending opportunities....

I present a novel approach to the study of the trade-off between stability and moral hazard induced by deposit insurance. Specifically, I use the FDI Reform Act of 2005 as an exogenous shock to the existing insurance scheme in the US and study its impact on bank risk. This reform raised the...

This paper exploits the information content of option markets to offer fresh insight into the Too-Big-to-Fail (TBTF) problem for banks. I employ option prices to construct a forward-looking measure of bank exposure to significant price drops (i.e. tail-risk) and explore cross-sectional...

Exploiting staggered interstate banking deregulation as exogenous shocks to bank geographic expansion, we examine the causal effect of geographic diversification on systemic risk. Using the gravity-deregulation approach developed in Goetz, Laeven, and Levine (2013, 2016), we find that bank...

We leverage a ‘catch-all' measure of financial innovation – research and development spending in the financial sector – to assess the net relationship between financial innovation and economic growth and evaluate the influence of macroprudential policy on this relationship. Using a panel...

Culture is a potent force in shaping individual and group behavior, yet it has received scant attention in the context of financial risk management and the 2007-09 financial crisis. This article presents a brief overview of the role of culture as it is seen by psychologists, sociologists, and...

The seeds for the 2007-09 financial collapse were sewn over many years and nurtured by ill-advised governmental housing policy, the presence of pervasive fraud both large and small and the widespread failure of personal integrity. A chronology of bad choices made by individuals and the...

This paper evaluates the model risk of models used for forecasting systemic and market risk. Model risk, which is the potential for different models to provide inconsistent outcomes, is shown to be increasing with market uncertainty. During calm periods, the underlying risk forecast models...