The Interaction between Financial Stability and Financial Institutions: Some Reflections

The contribution of this dissertation is to investigate financial stability issues from three different perspectives, illustrating that financial instability shows different characteristics over time, among financial institutions, and across financial activities. Chapter 1 reviews the normative and positive monetary policy literature on Taylor rules which have been augmented with exchange rates, asset prices, credit or leverage, and spreads. In addition, the chapter compares the development of these indicators for the core and the periphery of the Eurozone from 1999 (with the introduction of the euro) until 2013. Chapter 2 goes on to investigate the funding advantage that is provided to German Landesbanken by the joint liability scheme of the German Savings Banks Finance Group. Chapter 3 investigates peer-to-peer (P2P) lending and shows that the changing role of soft information, online platform default risk, liquidity risk and underdeveloped online secondary markets, and the institutionalization of P2P markets implies larger risks than traditional banking. Moreover, P2P lending can be considered part of the shadow banking sector.