Kostas Tsatsaronis

The Impact of the Euro on Europe's Financial Markets

This paper presents an overview of the impact of the introduction of the euro on Europes financial structure. It analyses changes in money markets, bond markets, equity markets and foreign exchange markets. The euros role in originating or catalysing trends has been uneven across the spectrum of financial markets. On the lender side, banks and investors in fixed income markets have become more focused on the characteristics of individual borrowers rather than the nationality of the issuer and have built up expertise to evaluate credit risk. European equity markets have also been affected by the enhanced ability of investors to build strategies with a pan-European perspective as prices increasingly reflected risk factors specific to industrial sectors rather than individual countries. On the borrower side, EMU has increased the attractiveness of market-based financing methods by allowing debt issuers to tap institutional portfolios across the euro area. Lower barriers to cross-border financial transactions have also increased the contestability of the market for financial services, be it at the wholesale or the retail level.

Attributing Systemic Risk to Individual Institutions

An operational macroprudential approach to financial stability requires tools that attribute system-wide risk to individual institutions. Making use of constructs from game theory, we propose an attribution methodology that has a number of appealing features: it can be used in conjunction with popular risk measures, it provides measures of institutions’ systemic importance that add up exactly to the measure of system-wide risk and it easily accommodates uncertainty about the validity of the risk model. We apply this methodology to a number of constructed examples and illustrate the interactions between drivers of systemic importance: size, the institution’s risk profile and strength of exposures to common risk factors. We also demonstrate how the methodology can be used for the calibration of macroprudential capital rules.

Risk in Financial Reporting: Status, Challenges and Suggested Directions

Advances in risk measurement technology have reshaped financial markets and the functioning of the financial system. More recently, they have been reshaping the prudential framework. Looking forward, they have the potential to reshape financial reporting too. Recent initiatives to improve financial reporting standards have brought to the fore significant differences in perspective between accounting standard setters and prudential authorities. Building on previous work, we argue that risk measurement and management technology can be instrumental in bridging this gap and, by the same token, in improving financial reporting. Risk measurement plays a crucial role in the measurement, verification and validation of valuations. It is the basis for giving more prominence to risk and measurement error information in public disclosures. And it could act as more of a focal point in the design of accounting standards, as greater consistency between sound risk management practices and accounting standards can help to narrow the wedge between accounting and underlying economic valuations.

Spoilt and Lazy: The Impact of State Support on Bank Behaviour in the International Loan Market

We analyze the syndicated loan market activity of banks with high support ratings. We find evidence that they underprice risk. Controlling for other characteristics, loans arranged by supported banks have, on average, lower spreads. In addition, these banks retain loans that are, on average, priced below market. At the same time, we do not find evidence suggesting that supported banks play any special role through strategic loan participation. Compared with other banks, their loan portfolios are less specialized, are more closely aligned with prevailing market trends, and exhibit lower persistence in their sectoral allocations.