"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...