I discuss changes to bank supervision and regulation since the financial crisis. Microprudential supervision promotes the safety and soundness of individual institutions, while macroprudential supervision focuses on emerging risks to financial system stability. I highlight tools for implementing this macroprudential approach to promoting financial stability, and discuss the interactions and proper relationship between monetary policy and financial stability. While macroprudential tools should be the first line of defense against emerging financial imbalances, in cases where those tools proved to be inadequate to limit risks to financial stability, monetary policy should be considered as a possible defense.

This paper provides cross-country evidence on the association between soundness and competition in the life insurance industry, where competition is measured by the Boone indicator. We analyse 10 European Union (EU) life insurance markets over the post-deregulation period 1999–2011. The results indicate that competition increases the soundness of the EU life insurance markets. Since the Boone indicator measures competition based on the reallocation of profits from inefficient insurers to efficient ones, our results suggest that efficiency is the mechanism through which competition contributes to insurer solvency. The soundness-enhancing effect of competition is greater for weak insurers than for healthy ones.

We develop an empirically based simulation study to test two types of policies designed to control systemic risk: preventive policies targeting capital requirements and mitigation policies targeting default resolution. We find that capital buffers reduce both the number of defaults and the resulting losses. The loss reduction benefit increases as the magnitude of adverse shocks becomes higher. We find that a simple branch-breakup resolution strategy reduces the loss borne by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). The mitigation effect becomes higher as the fraction of assets resolved through auctions and auction competitiveness increase.

Using a sample of public and private banks, we study how social capital relates to bank stability. Social capital, which reflects the level of cooperative norms in society, is likely to reduce opportunistic behavior (Jha and Chen 2015; Hasan et al., 2017) and, therefore, act as an informal monitoring mechanism. Consistent with our expectations, we find that banks in high social capital regions experienced fewer failures and less financial trouble during the 2007–2010 financial crisis than banks in low social capital regions. In addition, we find that social capital was negatively associated with abnormal risk-taking and positively associated with accounting transparency and accounting conservatism in the pre-crisis period of 2000–2006, indicating that risk-taking, accounting transparency, and accounting conservatism are possible channels through which social capital affected bank stability during the crisis.