Many countries have either eliminated or considerably reduced reserve requirements during the last decade. This paper derives the optimal reserve requirements of a simple economy with production and financial intermediation subject to costly state verification, and shows that one motivation for the widely observed reduction in the level of mandatory reserves is linked to the process of financial markets development.

This paper studies the systemic risk contribution of a set of large publicly traded European banks. Over a sample covering the last twenty years and three different crises, we find that all banks in our sample significantly contribute to systemic risk. Moreover, larger banks and banks with a business model more exposed to trading and financial market volatility, contribute more. In the shorter sample characterized by the Covid-19 shock, sovereign default risks significantly affected the systemic risk contribution of all banks. However, the ECB announcement of the Pandemic Emergency Purchasing Programme restored calm in the European banking sector.