Banks: selected investigations on the roles of liquidity, globalization and credit risk

This thesis presents three bank-related research studies inspired by some relevant events brought about by the recent subprime banking crisis. The first part of this work links banking-sector liquidity creation to both liquidity supply from central banks worldwide and international interbank liabilities, within a global macro-econometric framework. In the second part it is carried out a micro-econometric analysis on all global US banks with the intent to explain pre- and post-crisis dynamics in Net Inter-Office Accounts (NIOA). The last part of the thesis proposes a framework capable to model, among other things, inefficient policy interventions by a central banker during a crisis when an accurate assessment of the true solvency of a bank is unattainable.