We analyze a sample of large international banks in major advanced economies and examine the impact that bank-specific factors have on an institution's solvency risk and its contribution to systemic risk. We focus on the five categories that the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision has recently proposed as indicators of systemic importance. Our findings suggest that unstable funding is the main factor driving systemic risk. Furthermore, the combination of significant trading activities with global presence appears to exacerbate spillover risks to the global financial system. Interestingly, whereas trading activities contribute to the build-up of correlated or ‘wrong-way’ risk they help to mitigate individual solvency risk. Conversely, a decentralized approach to liquidity management seems to alleviate individual solvency risk but amplifies the transmission of financial distress across the financial system. This suggests that a macro-prudential approach to financial regulation should focus not only on scaling up micro-prudential measures but also on enabling the efficient transfer of risk between financial institutions.

Several studies have analyzed discretionary accruals to address earnings-smoothing behaviors in the banking industry. We argue that the characteristic link between accruals and earnings may be nonlinear, since both the incentives to manipulate income and the practical way to do so depend partially on the relative size of earnings. Given a sample of 15,268 US banks over the period 1996–2011, the main results in this paper suggest that, depending on the size of earnings, bank managers tend to engage in earnings-decreasing strategies when earnings are negative (“big-bath”), use earnings-increasing strategies when earnings are positive, and use provisions as a smoothing device when earnings are positive and substantial (“cookie-jar” accounting). This evidence, which cannot be explained by the earnings-smoothing hypothesis, is consistent with the compensation theory. Neglecting nonlinear patterns in the econometric modeling of these accruals may lead to misleading conclusions regarding the characteristic strategies used in earnings management.