Banks interact across different markets in order to diversify their risk exposure and to obtain funding from alternative sources. While this can increase bank efficiency and alleviate financial intermediation costs, it makes more difficult the effective regulation and supervision of banks and can expose them to liquidity shocks and contagion risk, as evidenced during the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-08. This Ph.D. dissertation consists of four chapters on banking, financial intermediation, and financial markets. The main objective of the thesis is to analyze the behavior of banks across different financial markets, and to explore the role of risk-taking, regulation, and liquidity shocks. Chapter 2 proposes an alternative approach to study the allocation of central bank liquidity among the participants of the unsecured interbank market. Chapter 3 examines the heterogeneous effects of risk-taking on bank efficiency. Chapter 4 evaluates the impact of idiosyncratic and aggregate liquidity shocks on the access and pricing of liquidity in the unsecured interbank funds market. Lastly, chapter 5 analyses the determinants of loan pricing in the cross-border syndicated market and the potential de-risking role of multilateral development banks.
