tailieunhanh - WORKING PAPER SERIES NO. 527 / SEPTEMBER 2005: BANKING SYSTEM STABILITY A CROSS-ATLANTIC PERSPECTIVE

The dependent variable leverage is one minus the ratio of equity over assets in market values. It therefore includes both debt and non-debt liabilities such as deposits. The argument for using leverage rather than debt as the dependent variable is that leverage, unlike debt, is well defined (see Welch, 2007). Leverage is a structure that increases the sensitivity of equity to the underlying performance of the (financial) firm. When referring to theory for an interpretation of the basic capital structure regression (1), the corporate finance literature typically does not explicitly distinguish between debt and non-debt liabilities (exceptions are the. | EUROPEAN CENTRAL BANK WORKING PAPER SERIES NO. 527 SEPTEMBER 2005 BANKING SYSTEM STABILITY A CROSS-ATLANTIC PERSPECTIVE by Philipp Hartmann Stefan Straetmans and Casper de Vries EUROPEAN CENTRAL BANK WORKING PAPER SERIES NO. 527 I SEPTEMBER 2005 BANKING SYSTEM STABILITY A CROSS-ATLANTIC PERSPECTIVE1 by Philipp Hartmann2 Stefan Straetmans3 and Casper de Vries4 In 2005 all ECB publications will feature a motif taken from the 50 banknote. This paper can be downloaded without charge from http or from the Social Science Research Network electronic library at http abstract_id 804465. I Paper prepared for the NBER project on Risks of Financial Institutions . We benefited from suggestions and criticism by many participants in the project in particular by the organizers Mark Carey also involving Dean Amel and Allen Berger and Rene Stulz by our discussant Tony Saunders and by Patrick de Fontnouvelle Gary Gorton Andy Lo Jim O Brien and Eric Rosengren. Furthermore we are grateful for comments we received at the 2004 European Finance Association Meetings in Maastricht in particular by our discussant Marco da Rin and by Christian Upper at the 2004 Ottobeuren seminar in economics notably the thoughts of our discussant Ernst Baltensberger of Friedrich Heinemann and of Gerhard Illing as well as at seminars of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis the ECB and the University of Frankfurt. Gabe de Bondt and David Marques Ibanez supported us enormously in finding yield spread data Lieven Baele and Richard Stehle kindly made us aware of pitfalls in Datastream equity helpful research assistance by Sandrine Corvoisier Peter Galos and Marco Lo Duca as well as editorial support by Sabine Wiedemann are gratefully acknowledged. Any views expressed only reflect those of the authors and should not be interpreted as the ones of the ECB or the Eurosystem. 2 European Central Bank DG Research Kaiserstrasse 29 .