Multinational banks may contribute to financial stability during local crisis episodes but can also increase the risk of importing instability from abroad, according to a Netherlands Bank paper published on Wednesday.

Ralph de Haas and Iman van Lelyveld, the paper's authors, use bank-level data on a large group of multinational bank subsidiaries and stand-alone domestic banks to compare the stability of their lending during the 2008–09 global financial crisis. The authors note that unlike