We find that certain bank characteristics—aggressive credit growth, less reliance on deposit funding, and size—prior to the 2007−2009 crisis are consistently related to the systemic dimensions of bank risk during the crisis. Exposures to real estate play a major role explaining this relationship: Banks with larger real estate betas exhibited higher levels of systemic risk during the crisis. The impact of real estate betas on systemic risk increases for larger banks, following aggressive credit growth policies in the presence of housing bubbles. We show that the relationship between bank characteristics and risk could also be detected using measures of systemic risk calculated prior to the financial crisis.

Abstract This paper investigates whether comovements between euro area equity returns at national and industry level changed after the introduction of the euro. By adopting a regression quantile-based methodology, we find that after 1999 the degree of comovements among euro area national equity markets was augmented. By explicitly controlling for the impact of global factors, we show that this result cannot be explained by recent worldwide trends. A more refined analysis based on an industry breakdown suggests that the increase in national index comovements is mainly driven by financial, industrial, and consumer services sectors.

This paper investigates the impact of ample liquidity provision by the European Central Bank on the functioning of the overnight unsecured interbank market from 2008 to 2014. We use novel data on interbank transactions derived from TARGET2, the main euro area payment system. To identify exogenous shocks to central bank liquidity, we exploit the timing of ECB liquidity operations and use a simple structural vector auto-regression framework. We argue that the ECB acted as a de facto lender-of-last-resort to the euro area banking system and identify two main effects of central bank liquidity provision on interbank markets. First, central bank liquidity replaces the demand for liquidity in the interbank market, especially during the financial crisis (2008–2010). Second, it increases the supply of liquidity in the interbank market in stressed countries (Greece, Italy and Spain) during the sovereign debt crisis (2011–2013).

SRISK is a measure of a firms' systemic risk contribution that is computed using its listed stock market price. SRISK measurement is extended and applied to firms that do not have listed equity. A mapping from balance sheet characteristics to SRISK for listed firms is applied to SRISK for unlisted European banks. The mapping is validated by comparing SRISK measures for unlisted banks with their losses in European bank stress-testing.