Following the financial crisis, the United Kingdom introduced major structural reforms to address concern about Too-Big-To-Fail (TBTF) banks, while France and Germany adopted much weaker reforms. This is puzzling given the presence of large universal banks engaged in market making activities in all three countries, which suffered significant losses during the international financial crisis, and given the commitments to reform made by political leaders in all three countries. The paper explains this policy divergence by analysing how dynamics of agenda setting contributed to the emergence of policy windows on structural reform. We explain the United Kingdom's decision to delegate the process to an independent commission as an example of venue shifting which helped to insulate the process from industry framing, and resulted in “conflict expansion” by mobilizing a wider coalition of actors in support of bank ringfencing. By contrast, in France and Germany the agenda was tightly managed through existing institutional venues, enabling industry to resist the framing of the issue around TBTF and limiting the role of non-business groups—a process we label as “conflict contraction.” We argue that analysis of agenda setting dynamics provides new insights into the cross-national variability of business power.

This paper reviews the market failures that may justify the need for liquidity regulation, assesses whether liquidity regulation is a necessary complement to Lender of Last Resort (LOLR) policies, capital regulation and prompt corrective action, surveys the available evidence on the net benefits of liquidity regulation, and concludes by outlining research directions useful to improve bank regulation design.

This paper surveys the recent academic literature on the economics of cross-border regulatory cooperation as well as recent policy developments in this area. While institutional arrangements of cross-border regulatory cooperation used to focus on day-to-day supervisory tasks, the crisis has given an impetus to a focus on cooperation at the bank resolution stage, with an array of different cooperation forms. A growing theoretical literature has documented different externalities arising from national supervision of cross-border banks, while empirical evidence has been relatively scarce. The paper concludes with a forward looking agenda both for policy reform and academic research in this area.

Banks within Europe have become larger and more international as Europe has moved towards a unified financial services market, but this trend has been reversed since the crisis. In order to establish the effect of these structural changes on output in Europe, we use a micro data set to investigate the impact of size (as measured by asset size) on banks' net interest margins. We show that larger banks offer lower borrowing costs for firms, which raises sustainable output. We then use NiGEM to look at the impact of banks becoming smaller and moving back into their home territory. We investigate the impacts on output according to country size, showing that the effects are generally larger in small countries, and also larger in economies that are more dependent on bank finance for their business investment decisions.

Low levels of bank capital and liquidity in combination with ongoing crises in other countries are shown to increase the probability of banking crises in OECD countries. Hence global coordination of regulatory reform is vital for reducing crisis risks.

Banking and finance are inherently pro-cyclical, a condition exacerbated by a combination of Basel II and mark-to-market accounting. But these latter measures have many advantages, so the need is to devise other counter-cyclical macro-prudential policies. This fragility was further enhanced by a decline in bank liquidity (reliance on wholesale funding) and a shift in govenance from partnerships to limited liability public companies. Some commentators have seen the solution to such pro-cyclicality in the guise of direct constraints on bank activity, such as the promotion of ‘narrow banking’ or limits on bank size. While there are arguments for toughening regulation as systemic risk increases, direct constraints are simplistic; more sensible ideas involve the adoption of better designed macro-prudential regulation, perhaps with some version of banking self-insurance. Quite what the future holds for bank regulation remains, however, to be decided.