Bank Resolution Plans (Living Wills) should help with the resolution of systemically important financial institutions (SIFIs) in distress. They should be used to clarify and simplify the legal structure and make it commensurate with the functional business lines of the institution. Living Wills could also prove the right regulatory instrument to achieve two further innovations in the resolution of SIFIs with cross-border presence. First, they could incorporate burden sharing arrangements between countries enabling burden sharing on an institution by institution basis. However, there would remain problems arising from the incompatibility of the laws governing cross-border bank insolvencies. Many countries are currently introducing special laws covering the resolution of SIFIs. This creates a window of opportunity to use Living Wills to introduce a second innovation: a consistent legal regime for the resolution of SIFIs across the G20 countries.

Using a new database covering some 91 supervisory agencies, this paper examines how important various skilled experts are in the supervisory process and the relative usage of different kinds of such experts. We seek to explore what kind of perspective supervisors in different institutional settings may adopt: a macro-oriented perspective or a more micro-approach? The answer to this question is relevant, as there is evidence that many financial crises have been macro-induced. It is found that central banks employ more economists and fewer lawyers in their supervisory/financial stability wing than non-central bank supervisory agencies. This result would indicate that an institutional setting with direct or indirect central bank involvement is more likely to produce a macro-approach. Next, there are significant economies of scale in financial supervision, though this can be measured by several alternative variables (e.g., the relative scale of bank intermediation). Finally, there do not appear to be major economies of scope. A more complex financial system with a well-developed stock market would need both more supervisors as well as more skilled ones. JEL classification: G28, E58, O40.

We jointly model green and regular bond markets. Green bonds can improve allocative efficiency and lower financing costs for green projects, but economies of scale, like liquidity fragmentation, may cause friction. Consequently, profitable and welfare-enhancing projects, green and brown, can be rationed in equilibrium. Rationing green projects happens with a shortage of climate investors, large non-monetary offsets, and/or costly fragmentation. Rationing regular projects can happen with a shortage of regular investors, but also with an abundance, when more profitable green projects crowd out regular ones. We propose an alternative security design that preserves green earmarking but prevents fragmentation.

Cross-border banking needs cross-border recapitalisation mechanisms. Each mechanism, however, suffers from the financial trilemma, which is that cross-border banking, national financial autonomy and financial stability are incompatible. In this paper, we study the efficiency of different burden-sharing agreements for the recapitalisation of the 30 largest banks in Europe. We consider bank bailouts for these banks in a simulation framework with stochastic country-specific bailout benefits. Among the burden sharing rules, we find that the majority and qualified-majority voting rules come close to the efficiency of a bailout mechanism with a supranational authority. Even a unanimous voting rule works better than home-country bailouts, which are very inefficient. If we assume additional systemic risk benefits, the efficiency of burden sharing rules comes close to the supranational solution.

The mutual and cross company exposures to fat-tail distributed risks determine the potential impact of a financial crisis on banks and insurers. We examine the systemic interdependencies within and across the European banking and insurance sectors during times of stress by means of extreme value analysis. While insurers exhibit a slightly higher interdependency in comparison with banks, the interdependency across the two sectors turns out to be considerably lower. This suggests that downside risk can be lowered through financial conglomeration.