Isabel Schnabel's articles on European Economy

Isabel Schnabel

Isabel Schnabel has been a Professor of Financial Economics at the University of Bonn since 2015. She was also appointed Member of the German Council of Economic Experts in June 2014.
Professor Schnabel obtained her doctorate from the University of Mannheim and served as a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Plank Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn. From 2007 until 2015 she held a Chair of Financial Economics at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. She was a visiting scholar at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the London School of Economics, and Harvard University. She is Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), Fellow of the CESifo Network, and Research Affiliate at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods (MPI) in Bonn. She is also a member of the Advisory Board and Administrative Council of the German Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin) and of the Advisory Scientific Committee of the European Systemic Risk Board (ESRB).
Her research focuses on financial stability, banking regulation, financial systems and institutions, international finance, and economic history. She has published in renowned journals such as the Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of International Economics, the Journal of the European Economic Association, the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, the Journal of Financial Intermediation, the Review of Finance, the Journal of Banking and Finance, and the Journal of Economic History.

The sovereign-bank nexus continues to endanger the stability of the euro area. We present a proposal how to mitigate spillovers of risks from sovereigns to banks. It encompasses risk-based large exposure limits and risk-adequate capital requirements, with the large exposure limits being most important – both conceptually and empirically. Based on a recent snapshot of banks’ sovereign exposures, our analysis shows that the introduction of large exposure limits would necessitate substantial portfolio shifts. In contrast, additional capital requirements would imply rather small additional capital buffers. Our proposal also suggests how to mitigate procyclicality, inherent to large exposure limits.