and the participants at the Harvard International Lunch Seminar for their excellent suggestions and comments. The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

Financial regulation is harmonized across countries even though countries vary in their ability to bail-out their banking sector in the event of a crisis. This paper addresses the question of whether countries with different fiscal capacity should optimally have different bank regulation, implemented -among other tools -through capital requirements -a question so far ignored by the theoretical banking literature. I show that countries with larger fiscal capacity should have lower ex-ante minimum bank capital requirements, in an environment with endogenously incomplete markets and overinvestment due to "Too-Big-To-Fail" moral hazard and pecuniary externalities. I also show that, in addition to a minimum bank capital requirement, regulators in countries with strong "Too-Big-To-Fail" moral hazard should impose a limit on the liabilities pledged by financial institutions in a crisis state. This implies limits on put options/CDS contracts. Finally, I argue that the type of regulatory instrument used is crucial as to whether larger fiscal capacity implies more or less stringent bank regulation.

This paper presents new stylized facts about exchange rates and their relationship with macroeconomic fundamentals. We show that macroeconomic surprises explain a large majority of the variation in nominal exchange rate changes at a quarterly frequency. Using a novel present value decomposition of exchange rate changes that is disciplined with survey forecast data, we show that macroeconomic surprises are also a very important driver of the currency risk premium component and explain about half of its variation. These surprises have even greater explanatory power during economic downturns and periods of financial uncertainty.

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