"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...

The Asian financial crisis marked the beginning of worldwide efforts to improve the effectiveness of financial supervision. However, the crisis that started in 2007–08 was a crude awakening: several of these improvements seemed unable to avoid or mitigate the crisis. This paper brings the...

By the early ‘2000 an increasing numbers of countries had adopted a well defined central bank framework, which is characterized by two intertwined features: the authority becomes specialized in achieving the monetary policy goals, and consequently its traditional responsibilities in pursuing...

Today policymakers in all the countries, shocked by the financial crisis of the 2007-2008, are reconsidering carefully the features of their supervisory regimes. This paper reviews the changing face of the financial supervisory regimes introducing new indicators to measure the level of...

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...

Following the 2007-09 Global Financial Crisis many countries have changed their financial supervisory architecture by increasing the involvement of central banks in supervision. This has led many scholars to argue that financial crises are an important driver in explaining the evolution of the...

A rapidly growing empirical literature is studying the causes and consequences of bank fragility in contemporary economies. The authors reviews the two basic methodologies adopted in cross-country empirical studies-the signals approach and the multivariate probability model-and their application...

We investigate the reasons that induce policymakers to assign banking supervision to central banks rather than involving authorities outside the banking sector. On the one hand, empirical results provide evidence that policymakers prefer that, conditional on several known features affecting...

A common legacy of banking crises is a large increase in government debt, as fiscal resources are used to shore up the banking system. Do crisis response strategies that commit more fiscal resources lower the economic costs of crises? Based on evidence from a sample of 40 banking crises we find...