"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...

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...

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...

In 2008 and 2009, bondholders of ailing companies were affected by a reemergenceof an important corporate restructuring strategy, known as a Distressed Exchange.Fourteen companies in 2008 completed this desperate attempt to avoid a formal bankruptcy filing – about twice as many as any single...

This paper supplies an agency-cost and contestable-markets perspective on the financial policies that triggered the Asian financial crisis. The agency-cost analysis hypothesizes that individual-country regulators knew that politically directed loans had made their banks insolvent, but...

Forty years ago, I developed a method of predicting bankruptcies by U.S. [public] companies that makes use of equity market values as well as fundamental financial and operating data. Since that time, my 'Z-Score' model has become one of the most widely used methods for assessing the...

Edward I. Altman is the Max L. Heine Professor of Finance, Emeritus at the Stern School of Business, New York University (NYU). He is also director of research in credit and debt markets at NYU's Salomon Center for the Study of Financial Institutions. An internationally recognized expert on...