The recent global financial crisis has highlighted the importance of the procyclicality of the financial sector. The procyclicality has transformed banks from mitigation mechanisms to amplifiers of changes in economic activity, potentially affecting financial stability and economic growth. The...

This article develops a search-theoretic model of financial intermediation to study the efficiency condition of the banking sector. Competitive financial intermediation is determined by the search decisions of both households (to find adequate financial products) and banks (to attract depositors...

A number of studies have pointed to various mistakes that consumers might make in their consumption-saving and financial decisions. We utilize a unique market experiment conducted by a large U.S. bank to assess how systematic and costly such mistakes are in practice. The bank offered consumers a...

Market discipline for financial institutions can be imposed not only from the liability side, as has often been stressed in the literature on the use of subordinated debt, but also from the asset side. This will be particularly true if good lending opportunities are in short supply, so that...

Some have argued that recent increases in credit risk transfer are desirable because they improve the diversification of risk. Others have suggested that they may be undesirable if they increase the risk of financial crises. Using a model with banking and insurance sectors, we show that credit...

This study employs various bootstrapped Malmquist indices and efficiency scores to investigate the effects of government regulation on the performance of the Iranian banking industry over the period 2003-2008. An alternative decomposition of the Malmquist index, introduced by Simar and Wilson...

A number of studies have pointed to various mistakes that consumers might make in their consumption-saving and financial decisions. We utilize a unique market experiment conducted by a large U.S. bank to assess how systematic and costly such mistakes are in practice. The bank offered consumers a...

We present a theory of banking regulation affecting procedural compliance in monitoring collateral in secured debt contracts. The theory suggests an externality which creates a gap between the socially optimal level of monitoring and the bank’s privately optimal level. Banks can not be...

This paper addresses an important contemporary issue; namely the implementation of the Basel Accord worldwide. The Basel Accord provides a series of measures to improve the stability of the world’s financial system but its implementation poses a number of challenges for both developing and...

Using data from 2004 – 2008, we investigate the effect of foreign ownership on banks efficiency and financial performance. The data is a balanced panel consisting of 16 banks and 640 observations. In random effect regression, to investigate the influence of foreign ownership type banks’, we...