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What is wrong with today's banking system? The past few years have shown that risks in banking can impose significant costs on the economy. Many claim, however, that a safer banking system would require sacrificing lending and economic growth.The Bankers' New Clothesexamines this claim and the narratives used by bankers, politicians, and regulators to rationalize the lack of reform, exposing them as invalid. Admati and Hellwig argue we can have a safer and healthier banking system without sacrificing any of the benefits of the system, and at essentially no cost to society. They show that banks are as fragile as they are not because they must be, but because they want to be--and they get away with it. Whereas this situation benefits bankers, it distorts the economy and exposes the public to unnecessary risks. Weak regulation and ineffective enforcement allowed the buildup of risks that ushered in the financial crisis of 2007-2009. Much can be done to create a better system and prevent crises. Yet the lessons from the crisis have not been learned. Admati and Hellwig seek to engage the broader public in the debate by cutting through the jargon of banking, clearing the fog of confusion, and presenting the issues in simple and accessible terms.The Bankers' New Clothescalls for ambitious reform and outlines specific and highly beneficial steps that can be taken immediately.

We introduce SRISK to measure the systemic risk contribution of a financial firm. SRISK measures the capital shortfall of a firm conditional on a severe market decline, and is a function of its size, leverage and risk. We use the measure to study top financial institutions in the recent financial crisis. SRISK delivers useful rankings of systemic institutions at various stages of the crisis and identifies Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Morgan Stanley, Bear Stearns, and Lehman Brothers as top contributors as early as 2005-Q1. Moreover, aggregate SRISK provides early warning signals of distress in indicators of real activity.

We build a macrofinance model of shadow banking—the transformation of risky assets into securities that are money-like in quiet times but become illiquid when uncertainty spikes. Shadow banking economizes on scarce collateral, expanding liquidity provision, boosting asset prices and growth, but also building up fragility. A rise in uncertainty raises shadow banking spreads, forcing financial institutions to switch to collateral-intensive funding. Shadow banking collapses, liquidity provision shrinks, liquidity premia and discount rates rise, asset prices and investment fall. The model generates slow recoveries, collateral runs, and flight-to-quality effects, and it sheds light on Large-Scale Asset Purchases, Operation Twist, and other interventions.

We analyze the effects of institutional cross-ownership of same-industry firms on product market performance and behavior. Our results show that cross-held firms experience significantly higher market share growth than do non-cross-held firms. We establish causality by relying on a difference-in-differences approach based on the quasi-natural experiment of financial institution mergers. We also find evidence suggesting that institutional cross-ownership facilitates explicit forms of product market collaboration (such as within-industry joint ventures, strategic alliances, or within-industry acquisitions) and improves innovation productivity and operating profitability. Overall, our evidence indicates that cross-ownership by institutional blockholders offers strategic benefits by fostering product market coordination.

We present an economic model of systemic risk in which undercapitalization of the financial sector as a whole is assumed to harm the real economy, leading to a systemic risk externality. Each financial institution's contribution to systemic risk can be measured as its systemic expected shortfall (SES), that is, its propensity to be undercapitalized when the system as a whole is undercapitalized. SES increases in the institution's leverage and its marginal expected shortfall (MES), that is, its losses in the tail of the system's loss distribution. We demonstrate empirically the ability of components of SES to predict emerging systemic risk during the financial crisis of 2007–2009.

This paper argues that the extent of financial contagion exhibits a form of phase transition: as long as the magnitude of negative shocks offecting financial institutions are sufficiently small, a more densely connected financial network (corresponding to a more diversified pattern of interbank liabilities) enhances financial stability. However, beyond a certain point, dense interconnections serve as a mechanism for the propagation of shocks, leading to a more fragile financial system. Our results thus highlight that the same factors that contribute to resilience under certain conditions may function as significant sources of systemic risk under others.

We study the personal credit market using unique individual-level data covering fintech and traditional lenders. We show that fintech lenders acquire market share by lending first to higher-risk borrowers and then to safer borrowers, and rely mainly on hard information to make credit decisions. Fintech borrowers are significantly more likely to default than neighbor individuals with the same characteristics borrowing from traditional financial institutions. Furthermore, they tend to experience a short-lived reduction in the cost of credit, because their indebtedness increases more than non-fintech borrowers after loan origination. However, fintech lenders’ pricing strategies are likely to take this into account.

We consider the drivers and implications of the growth of ‘BigTech’ in finance – i.e. the financial services offerings of technology companies with established presence in the market for digital services. BigTech firms often start with payments. Thereafter, some expand into the provision of credit, insurance and money management products, either directly or in cooperation with financial institution partners. Focusing on credit, we show that BigTech firms lend more in countries with less competitive banking sectors and less stringent bank regulation. Analysing the case of Argentina, we find support for the hypothesis that BigTech lenders, by acquiring a vast amount of non-traditional information, have an advantage in credit assessment relative to a traditional credit bureau. They also serve unbanked borrowers, and may have an advantage in contract enforcement. It is too early to judge the extent of BigTech’s eventual advance into the provision of financial services. However, the early evidence allows us to pose pertinent questions that bear on their impact on financial stability and overall economic welfare.

The recent financial crisis has prompted much new research on the interconnectedness of the modern financial system and the extent to which it contributes to systemic fragility. Network connections diversify firms' risk exposures, but they also create channels through which shocks can spread by contagion. We review the extensive literature on this issue, with the focus on how network structure interacts with other key variables such as leverage, size, common exposures, and short-term funding. We discuss various metrics that have been proposed for evaluating the susceptibility of the system to contagion and suggest directions for future research.

Many observers have argued that the regulatory framework in place prior to the global financial crisis was deficient because it was largely “microprudential” in nature. A microprudential approach is one in which regulation is partial equilibrium in its conception and aimed at preventing the costly failure of individual financial institutions. By contrast, a “macroprudential” approach recognizes the importance of general equilibrium effects, and seeks to safeguard the financial system as a whole. In the aftermath of the crisis, there seems to be agreement among both academics and policymakers that financial regulation needs to move in a macroprudential direction. In this paper, we offer a detailed vision for how a macroprudential regime might be designed. Our prescriptions follow from a specific theory of how modern financial crises unfold and why both an unregulated financial system, as well as one based on capital rules that only apply to traditional banks, is likely to be fragile. We begin by identifying the key market failures at work: why individual financial firms, acting in their own interests, deviate from what a social planner would have them do. Next, we discuss a number of concrete steps to remedy these market failures. We conclude the paper by comparing our proposals to recent regulatory reforms in the United States and to proposed global banking reforms.