"Considered as a social contract, a financial safety net imposes duties and confers rights on different sectors of the economy. Within a nation, elements of incompleteness inherent in this contract generate principal-agent conflicts that are mitigated by formal agreements, norms, laws, and the...

"This essay shows that government credit-allocation schemes generate incentive conflicts that undermine the quality of bank supervision and eventually produce banking crisis. For political reasons, most countries establish a regulatory culture that embraces three economically contradictory...

Confidence in combining inflation-targeting-cum-flexible-exchange-rate regimes with isolated microprudential regulation as a means to guarantee both macroeconomic and financial stability has been shattered by the scale and synchronization of asset price booms and busts that preceded the current...

Banking markets are becoming increasingly international through financial liberalization and general economic integration. Using bank-level data for 80 countries for 1988-95, the authors examine the extent of foreign ownership in national banking markets. They compare net interest margins,...