At the beginning of the present century, the literature on financial integration focused on the benefits of increased integration. In particular, the literature emphasized that a well-integrated financial system allows economic agents to engage in risk sharing while enhancing the smooth transmission of monetary policy. However, the international financial crisis of 2007-08 and the euro area sovereign debt crisis of 2009-15, brought to the fore the flip side of increased financial integration – namely, that higher financial integration among national jurisdictions creates the potential for destabilizing cross-country spillovers of capital flows. The papers in this Special Issue address financial system vulnerabilities in the aftermath of the 2007-08 financial crisis and the 2009-15 euro area crisis. In particular, the papers assess (1) vulnerabilities arising from such factors as the liberalization of financial systems, cross-country contagion, and climate change, and (2) policy responses, including macroprudential supervision and quantitative easing, to financial instabilities.

This study analyses the effect of political money contributions on U.S. banks’ IPOs. We employ unbalanced panel data of 367 U.S. banks’ IPOs for the period January 1998 to December 2019. Our findings reveal that investors perceive Political Money Contributions (PMC) by U.S. banks as a proxy for political reach and connectedness. We document an inverse relationship between total PMC and the level of underpricing, which implies that both lobbying and PAC expenditure pay off on issue day as donors incur less underpricing. Initial returns decrease with PAC contributions to House of Representatives candidates, whereas the returns relate to the partisan identity of the candidates receiving PAC contributions. We document that those individual contributions by directors bring significant benefits to the IPO banks. Finally, we show that the political contributions of board members, particularly those of CEOs and founders, are associated with better returns in the long term.

We examine a policy in which owners of banks provide funds in the form of a surety bond in addition to equity capital. This policy would require banks to provide the regulator with funds that could be invested in marketable securities. Investors in the bank receive the income from the surety bond as long as the bank is in business. The capital value could be used by bank regulators to pay off the banks’ liabilities in case of bank failure. After paying depositors, investors would receive the remaining funds, if any. Analytically, this instrument is a way of creating charter value but, as opposed to Keeley (1990) and Hellman, Murdock and Stiglitz (2000), restrictions on competition are not necessary to generate positive rents. We demonstrate that capital requirements alone cannot prevent the moral hazard problem arising from deposit insurance.