Historically, generalization about economic fluctuations in an economic system over extended periods of time has proved to be difficult. Yet, it has been even more difficult to generalize across economic systems. In a historical setting, there are many theories offered to explain the creation of...

We examine firm managers' incentives to commit fraud in a model where firms seek funding from investors and investors can monitor firms at a cost in order to get more precise information about firm prospects. We show that fraud incentives are highest when business conditions are good, but not...

The Chinese banking system, characterized by a large proportion of state-ownership and low capitalization, has started a reform process based on three main pillars: (i) bank restructuring, with the cleaning- up of non-performing loans and public capital injections, particularly in the four...

The thrust of current deposit insurance reform--risk-based insurance premiums and capital requirements--is an effort to price deposit insurance more fairly. Fairly pricing deposit insurance eliminates inequitable wealth transfers, but it does not lead to an efficient equilibrium. This paper...

In a finite-trader version of the Diamond-Dybvig (1983) model, the symmetric, ex-ante efficient allocation is implementable by a direct mechanism (i.e., each trader announces the type of his own ex-post preference) in which truthful revelation is the strictly dominant strategy for each trader....

The existing empirical literature on banking crises has not produced agreement on their causes. Using a sample of 75 emerging markets in 1975-1997, we attempt to determine what we know about banking crises by establishing which previous results are robust. Among the robust causes of...

In view of this changing landscape, we look at the three major drivers of growth in consumer finance: auto finance, housing finance and consumer durable finance. We discuss the trends in each of these areas as well as the shortcomings which are slowing down growth. We present some of the...

Following Diamond (1997) and Fecht (2004) we use a model in which financial market access of households restrains the efficiency of the liquidity insurance that banks' deposit contracts provide to households that are subject to idiosyncratic liquidity shocks. But in contrast to these approaches...

This paper explores theoretically and empirically the link between Financial Liberalization (FL) and the banking crisis that often follow. We also investigate the proposition, classical in development economics, that FL should result in an increase in supply of funds to the real sector. To...

This paper develops a new model of international private debt financing. It shows the possibility of discontinuity in the amount of financial intermediation when the intermediary is inefficient. The model suggests a mechanism that can generate the following sequence of events: A period of...