In this paper, we contribute to the literature by examining the determinants of net interest margin (NIM) of European and US banks in a zero lower bound situation while controlling for important institutional design factors. We analyse a large sample of annual data on 629 European banks and 526 US during the 2011–2016 period, which also covers periods of zero and negative rates in many of the observed countries. We test three hypotheses and come to three main conclusions. First, NIM is significantly influenced by the different institutional designs of capital‐based (the UK and the US) and bank‐based financial markets (continental Europe). Second, there are differences in NIM caused by bank size. Finally, we show significant differences by bank type: savings banks, real estate and mortgage banks, and cooperative banks report consistently lower NIMs than commercial banks and bank holdings. Contrary to other researchers, we observe a negative relationship between NIM and the yield curve slope.

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Abstract:This paper presents the construction of a new indicator (named the JT index) evaluating the economy's fi nancial stability, which is based on a fi nancial scoring model estimated on Czech corporate accounting data. Seven fi nancial indicators capable of explaining business failure at a 1-year prediction horizon are identifi ed. Using the model estimated in this way, an aggregate indicator of the creditworthiness of the Czech corporate sector (the JT index) is then constructed and its evolution over time is shown. This indicator aids the estimation of the risks of this sector going forward and broadens the existing analytical set-up used by the Czech National Bank for its fi nancial stability analyses. The results suggest that the creditworthiness of the Czech corporate sector steadily improved between 2004 and 2006. However, the JT index for 2007 and 2008 deteriorated what could be explained through global market turbulences while the further decrease in 2009 rather by the global recession. The used methodology for the construction of the JT index might be suitable for decision makers when evaluating the economy's fi nancial stability. Although our research is done as a case study on the Czech Republic, its basic idea might be easily applied to other countries as well.

Abstract:The global banking system proved signifi cantly vulnerable to systemic risk during the 2007-2009 fi nancial crisis. In this paper, we construct an agent-based network model of systemic risk to a banking system, and use it for stress-testing of several different regulatory measures. First, our simulations confi rm that suffi cient capital buffers in individual banks are crucial for protecting the stability of the whole system. Second, we show that the regulatory measures installed as preventive measures to ensure that the banks possess suffi cient capital buffers have almost no positive effects on stability when the system is collapsing. Finally, we highlight various data defi ciencies which prevent the researchers and regulators from fully understanding the complete range of systemic risk and make it diffi cult to devise effective and targeted regulatory measures at this time.

In this paper, we use an agent-based simulation combined with innovative calibration techniques to model the European banking system as accurately as possible. Our novel contribution to the recent literature involves adding bank heterogeneity to the model. To estimate the levels of shock propagation in large-scale events, such as the default of multiple banks, as well as smaller events, such as the defaults of an individual bank, we provide granular modeling of bank behavior. We extend the existing network approach by adding the ability to model banks of various sizes and the detailed connections of 286 individual banks across 9 European countries. Our main results show how the failure of a large Italian bank or of a medium-sized German bank might create a cascade of problems for the entire European banking sector. Our results reveal that Italian banks make a much larger contribution to systemic risk than German or French banks. We believe that computational experiments in this model provide valuable insights into systemic risk within the European banking system for policy makers when estimating the systemic effects of individual bank defaults. From a regulatory perspective, we recommend the introduction of a tighter limit for all types of inter-bank exposures than the recent limit of 25% of Tier 1 capital. Moreover, we propose an increase in the risk-weights for exposures to large banks in Germany, France, Italy, and Spain.