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We identify the relative importance for bank lending of borrower (demand-side) versus bank (supply-side) factors. We submit thousands of fictitious mortgage applications, changing one borrower-level factor at time, to the major Italian online mortgage platform. Each application goes to all banks. Borrower and bank factors are equally strong in causing and explaining loan acceptance. For pricing, borrower factors are instead stronger. Moreover, banks supplying less credit accept riskier borrowers. Exploiting the administrative credit register, there is borrower-lender assortative matching, and the bank-level strength measure estimated on the experimental data is associated to credit supply and risk-taking to real firms. ; This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 648398). Peydró also acknowledges financial support from the PGC2018-102133-B-I00 (MCIU/AEI/FEDER, UE) grant and from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, through the Severo Ochoa Programme for Centres of Excellence in R&D (CEX2019-000915-S)

We show that negative monetary policy rates induce systemic banks to reach‐for‐yield. For identification, we exploit the introduction of negative deposit rates by the European Central Bank in June 2014 and a novel securities register for the 26 largest euro area banking groups. Banks with more customer deposits are negatively affected by negative rates, as they do not pass negative rates to retail customers, in turn investing more in securities, especially in those yielding higher returns. Effects are stronger for less capitalized banks, private‐sector (financial and nonfinancial) securities and dollar‐denominated securities. Affected banks also take higher risk in loans. ; This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 648398). Peydró also acknowledges financial support from the PGC2018‐102133‐B‐I00 (MCIU/AEI/FEDER, UE) grant and the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, through the Severo Ochoa Programme for Centres of Excellence in R&D (SEV‐2015‐0563). The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the European Central Bank, Deutsche Bundesbank, or the Eurosystem.

Abstract
Banking crises are recurrent phenomena, often induced by excessive bank risk-taking, which may be due to behavioural reasons (over-optimistic banks neglecting risks) and to conflicts of interest between bank shareholders/managers and debtholders/taxpayers (banks exploiting moral hazard). We test whether US banks' stock returns in the 2007–8 financial crisis are associated with bank insiders' sales of their own bank's shares in the period prior to 2006Q2 (the peak and reversal in real estate prices). We find that top-five executives' sales of shares predict bank performance during the crisis. Interestingly, effects are insignificant for the sales of independent directors and other officers. Moreover, the top-five executives' impact is stronger for banks with higher exposure to the real estate bubble, where a one standard deviation increase of insider sales is associated with a 13.33 percentage point drop in stock returns during the crisis period. Finally, even though bankers in riskier banks sold more shares (furthering their own interests), they did not change their bank's policies, for example, by reducing bank-level exposure to real estate. The informational content of bank insider trading before the crisis suggests that insiders knew that their banks were taking excessive risks, which has important implications for theory, public policy and the understanding of crises, as well as a supervisory tool for early warning signals.

Although recent research shows that the euro has spurred cross-border financial integration, the exact mechanisms remain unknown. We investigate the underlying channels of the euro's effect on financial integration using data on bilateral banking linkages among twenty industrial countries in the past thirty years. We also construct a dataset that records the timing of legislative-regulatory harmonization policies in financial services across the European Union. We find that the euro's impact on financial integration is primarily driven by eliminating the currency risk. Legislative-regulatory convergence has also contributed to the spur of cross-border financial transactions. Trade in goods, while highly correlated with bilateral financial activities, does not play a key role in explaining the euro's positive effect on financial integration.

We investigate the effect of financial integration on the degree of international business cycle synchronization. For identfication, we use a confidential database on banks' bilateral exposure over the past three decades and employ a novel bilateral country-pair panel instrumental vari- ables approach. First, we show that conditional on global shocks and country-pair fixed factors countries that become more financially integrated over time have less synchronized growth pat- terns, in line with the standard theories of output fluctuations. Second, to isolate the one-way impact of financial integration on output co-movement and account for measurement error in the financial integration measure, we exploit variation in the transposition dates of the European Union-wide legislative acts (the Directives) from the Financial Services Action Plan (FSAP). These laws are designed to harmonize regulation of financial markets in the European Union. We find that increases in financial integration stemming from regulatory-legislative harmoniza- tion policies in capital markets are followed by more divergent output cycles, even when we condition on monetary unification. Our results contrast with those of the previous empirical studies. We reconcile the different results by showing that the earlier estimates suffer from the standard identification problems.