“…After the global crisis, UK and euro area banks reduced their leverage to meet the new Basel III standards. Afterward, the increased concerns regarding the creditworthiness of European banks that experienced difficulties in the 2010 sovereign debt crisis catalysed these banks to reduce their international operations, especially in emerging markets (Cull and Martínez-Pería, 2013;BIS, 2018), and to contract both domestic and interbank lending (see, Becker and Ivashina, 2018;Acharya et al, 2018;Abbassi et al, 2020;Bottero et al, 2020).…”