We test for the existence of a moral hazard effect attributable to official crisis lending by analyzing the evolution of sovereign bond spreads in emerging markets before and after the Russian crisis. The nonbailout of Russia in August 1998 is interpreted as an event that decreased the perceived probability of future crisis lending to emerging markets. In the presence of moral hazard, such an event should raise not only the level of spreads, but also the sensitivity with which spreads reflect fundamentals as well as their cross-country dispersion. We find strong evidence for all three effects.

The declared intention of policy makers is that future bank restructuring should be conducted through bail-in rather than bail-out. Over the past years there have been a few cases of European banks being restructured where creditors were bailed in. This paper exploits these events to investigate the market reactions of stock prices and credit default swap (CDS) spreads of European banks in order to gauge the extent to which it is expected that bail-in will indeed become the new regime. We find evidence of increased CDS spreads and falling stock prices most notably after the bail-in in Cyprus. However, bail-in expectations appear to depend on the sovereign's fiscal strength, i. e., reactions are stronger for banks in countries with limited fiscal space for bail-out. Moreover, actual bail-ins lead to stronger market reactions than the legal implementation of bank resolution regimes, supporting the saying that actions speak louder than words.

This paper reviews some of the most prominent asset price bubbles from the past 400 years and documents how central banks (or other institutions) reacted to those bubbles. The historical evidence suggests that the emergence of bubbles is often preceded or accompanied by an expansionary monetary policy, lending booms, capital inflows, and financial innovation or deregulation. We find that the severity of the economic crisis following the bursting of a bubble is less linked to the type of asset than to the financing of the bubble -- crises are most severe when accompanied by a lending boom and high leverage of market players, and when financial institutions themselves are participating in the buying frenzy. Past experience also suggests that a purely passive "cleaning up the mess" stance toward the buildup of bubbles is, in many cases, costly. Monetary policy and macroprudential measures that lean against inflating bubbles can and sometimes have helped deflate bubbles and mitigate the associated economic crises. However, the correct implementation of such proactive policy approaches remains fraught with difficulties.

In an influential paper, La Porta, Lopez-De-Silanes and Shleifer (2002) argued that public ownership of banks is associated with lower GDP growth. We show that this relationship does not hold for all countries, but depends on a country's financial development and political institutions. Public ownership is harmful only if a country has low financial development and low institutional quality. The negative impact of public ownership on growth fades quickly as the financial and political system develops. In highly developed countries, we find no or even positive effects. Policy conclusions for individual countries are likely to be misleading if such heterogeneity is ignored.

Using information on family background, we estimate returns to education, allowing for the heterogeneity of returns. In order to control for the unobserved heterogeneity shared by family members, we construct a siblings sample and employ family fixed-effects and family correlated random-effects models. Our main result is that family background still matters despite the substantial political efforts to equalize educational opportunities in Germany. Persons with less-educated parents earn lower wages, but have higher returns to education. This supports the view that persons from less-educated backgrounds still face higher marginal costs in the educational system. The same interplay between the wage level and marginal returns is found for the effect of gender and cohort.

We analyze the relationship between asset price bubbles and systemic risk, using bank-level data covering almost thirty years. Systemic risk of banks rises already during a bubble’s build-up phase, and even more so during its bust. The increase differs strongly across banks and bubble episodes. It depends on bank characteristics (especially bank size) and bubble characteristics, and it can become very large: In a median real estate bust, systemic risk increases by almost 70 percent of the median for banks with unfavorable characteristics. These results emphasize the importance of bank-level factors for the build-up of financial fragility during bubble episodes.