Systemic banking crises have placed enormous pressure on national governments to intervene. The empirical literature, however, is inconclusive on what an optimal bailout program should look like to mitigate the negative consequences of government interventions in the banking sector. We find that, in general government interventions have a negative impact on banking sector stability, significantly increasing its risk. In particular, we find that among bailout measures, nationalization and asset management companies (AMCs) contribute most to the risk effect and that among liquidity support mechanisms, public guarantees are the largest contributor to the risk effect. However, we also find that by making an appropriate choice of intervention mechanisms, governments can mitigate the negative consequences stemming from the above-mentioned effects.

We examine the international transmission of liquidity shocks from multinational bank holding companies to their subsidiaries during the financial crisis of 2008. Our results demonstrate that a subsidiary's reduction in lending is strongly related to its parent bank's lending via the interbank market. While subsidiaries that were dependent on interbank financing increased their credit supply prior to the crisis, they reduced their lending activities during the crisis. Additionally, we observe that interbank-dependent subsidiaries tried to change their funding strategy when they were unable to increase their deposit growth significantly during the crisis. During the crisis, subsidiaries could not rely on their parent banks’ support via the interbank market and encountered problems in attracting new depositors, which could explain the significant decline in lending during the financial crisis. These findings highlight the need to regulate and monitor multinational funding strategies, especially in the interbank market.