A recent line of research highlights trust as an important element guiding the decision of households to invest into risky financial assets and insurance products. This paper contributes to this literature by identifying happiness as another key driver of the same decision. Using detailed survey data from a sample of Dutch households, we show that the impact of happiness on households’ financial decisions works in the opposite direction and is more economically important compared to trust. Specifically, happiness leads to a lower probability of investing into risky financial assets and having insurance, while trust has the usual positive effect found in the literature. Furthermore, the negative effect of happiness on the ownership of risky financial assets is about 6% higher compared to the positive equivalent of trust. Similarly, the negative effect of happiness on the ownership of insurance is 3% higher than the positive effect of trust.

Standard banking theory suggests that there exists an optimal level of credit risk that yields maximum bank profit. We identify the optimal level of risk-weighted assets that maximizes banks’ returns in the full sample of US banks over the period 1996–2011. We find that this optimal level is cyclical for the average bank, being higher than the realized credit risk in relatively stable periods with high profit opportunities for banks but quickly decreasing below the realized in periods of turmoil. We place this cyclicality into the nexus between bank risk and monetary policy. We show that a contractionary monetary policy in stable periods, where the optimal credit risk is higher than the realized credit risk, increases the gap between them. An increase in this gap also comes as a result of an expansionary monetary policy in bad economic periods, where the realized risk is higher than the optimal risk.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the choice between adopting a monetary base or an interest rate setting instrument to maintain financial stability. Our results suggest that the interest rate instrument is preferable, since during times of a panic or financial crisis the Central Bank automatically satisfies the increased demand for money. Thus, it prevents sharp losses in asset values and enhanced asset volatility.

This paper examines the policy issues associated with resolving the possible failure of Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac (housing enterprises). It compares and contrasts these issues with those raised in the context of large bank failures and also identifies important differences in the extant supervisory authorities. Based on these discussions, a number of policy suggestions are offered to minimize the cost of resolution and protect taxpayers from loss should a large bank or housing enterprise fail.

This paper presents a reduced form credit risk model to study CMBS pricing and CMBS market efficiency during and after the credit crisis with a comprehensive loan, bond and deal level data set. Using a model determined fair value, an automated trading strategy based on a newly determined risk ratio buys undervalued and sells overvalued CMBS. These strategies result in substantial trading profits between November 2007 and June 2015. Controlling for CMBS sector risk factors, we reject CMBS market efficiency over the entire sample period. When we split the sample into the Crisis and Recovery periods, we observe persistent abnormal returns over both subperiods, which is consistent with an inefficient CMBS market. Because the CMBS market appears to be inefficient, our results suggest that the approach presented in this paper may facilitate the increased financial stability of the CRE sector through the better pricing and risk management of CMBS.

In this study, we test for the possible contagion effects of the 10-year Greek government bond yield. We first employ the well-documented adjusted correlation coefficient of Forbes and Rigobon (2002) and then we estimate an exponential generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity model extended for volatility spillovers. Finally, we propose an extension of the corrected Dynamic Conditional Correlation (cDCC) model, which allows for structural breaks in the correlation dynamics. The suggested cDCC specification provides a natural testing framework for the correlation contagion hypothesis. Compared with other similar approaches, the proposed structural break cDCC approach allows for consistent inferences. The results do not confirm any contagious effects stemming from the 10-year Greek sovereign bond.

A key policy to limit the possibility of bank runs is an explicit deposit insurance scheme, which can be either privately or government funded. Using syndicated loans from 63 countries during the period 1985–2016, we study the effect of government involvement in deposit insurance funding on price and non-price characteristics of loans. We show that changes from purely private-funded to either government-funded or jointly funded deposit insurance increase all-in-spread-drawn by approximately 4.6 %, further increase loan fees, decrease loan maturity, and increase the use of performance pricing provisions. Our findings are consistent with the moral hazard problem behind government-funded deposit insurance schemes.

Existing research generally finds that the magnitude of the effect of supervisory rating shocks on real economic activity is small and short-lived. This finding is puzzling because downgrades, especially substantial ones, often include lending restrictions and thus would be expected to have a strong effect on real activity. We use the local projections approach to investigate whether this anomaly can be explained by nonlinearities or asymmetric effects; our empirical results indicate that they are indeed present. In particular, we find that the effects are asymmetric: bank downgrades lead to a pronounced decline in real activity, while upgrades do not result in its increase. Furthermore, we document the presence of nonlinear effects for the downgrade—but not upgrade—shocks, as their impact increases disproportionately with its size.