Offshore financial centres and banks’ funding responses to liquidity shocks
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 24238562 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Stefano Maiani (0000-0002-4862-1725, Edinburgh Business School, Heriot-Watt University , Edinburgh, EH14 4AS), Barbara Casu (0000-0003-3586-328X, Bayes Business School, City University of London , London, EC1Y 8TZ), Angela Gallo (Bayes Business School, City University of London , London, EC1Y 8TZ), Alexandros Kontonikas (0000-0003-3725-5149, Essex Business School, University of Essex , Colchester, CO4 3SQ) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Publication date | 2026-10-21 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Socio-Economic Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1475-1461 • E-ISSN: 1475-147X |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1093/ser/mwag069 |
| OpenAlex | W7215005986 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 59 |
This article rethinks financial embeddedness by examining how transnational banks respond to funding pressures through the infrastructures of offshore financial centres (OFCs). Using hand-collected information, we construct a novel dataset of European banks across six Eurozone countries from 2009–15. We show that during the sovereign debt crisis, banks engaged in latent network activation, mobilizing offshore conduit arrangements to secure foreign currency funding as market conditions tightened, even when official liquidity support was available. We argue that embeddedness in global finance is dynamic and crisis-contingent, since relationships and organizational infrastructures that appear peripheral in stable periods can become decisive under stress. OFCs emerge not as passive enablers of regulatory arbitrage, but as active infrastructures used by global banks to access cross-border liquidity when conventional funding channels become impaired. This has important implications for the governance and oversight of cross-border liquidity flows and off-balance-sheet funding structures.
bank financing · banking networks · eurozone crisis · liquidity shocks · liquidity support · offshore financial centers · regulatory arbitrage · sovereign debt crisis · transnational banks · Banking stability, regulation, efficiency · Global Financial Crisis and Policies · Global Financial Regulation and Crises
Liquidated
Uncovering Offshore Financial Centers
Estimation of Panel Vector Autoregression in Stata
Generalized impulse response analysis in linear multivariate models
Estimating Vector Autoregressions with Panel Data
Macroeconomics and Reality
Another look at the instrumental variable estimation of error-components models
Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance
The Money Laundry
Estimating Illicit Financial Flows
Economic Action and Social Structure
The Sources and Consequences of Embeddedness for the Economic Performance of Organizations
The anatomy of the Cayman Islands offshore financial center
The political economy of shadow banking
The role of shadow banking entities in the financial crisis
Politics, time and space in the era of shadow banking
Limits of floating exchange rates
Archipelago Capitalism
Imagined Futures
Why reregulation after the crisis is feeble
Die Krise but not La Crise? The Financial Crisis and the Transformation of German and French Banking Systems
Embeddedness in the Making of Financial Capital
Shopping for Anonymous Shell Companies
Community, market, state-and associations
Networks as the Pipes and Prisms of the Market
Lehman Brothers in the Dutch offshore financial centre
| Highly cited | No |
|---|