The global financial crisis has highlighted the importance of early identification of weak banks: when problems are identified late, solutions are much more costly. Until recently, Europe has seen only a small number of outright bank failures, which made the estimation of early warning models...

This paper tests the role of different banks' liquidity funding structures in explaining the banks' failures, which occurred in the United States between 2007 and 2009. The results highlight that funding is indeed a significant factor in explaining banks' probability of default. By confirming...

When a country's banking system becomes more linked to the global banking network, does that system get more or less prone to a banking crisis? Using model simulations and econometric estimates based on a world-wide dataset, we find an M-shaped relationship between financial stability of a...

Volatility in Italian sovereign spreads has increased since mid-2011. This paper finds that news on the euro area debt crisis and country specific events were important drivers of sovereign spreads. Movements in sovereign spreads affect CDS spreads and bond yields of Italian banks, and are...

We examine the properties of house price fluctuations across 18 advanced economies over the past 40 years. We ask two specific questions: First, how synchronized are housing cycles across these countries? Second, what are the main shocks driving movements in global house prices? To address these...

Financial network analysis is used to provide firm level bottom-up holistic visualizations of interconnections of financial obligations in global OTC derivatives markets. This helps to identify Systemically Important Financial Intermediaries (SIFIs), analyse the nature of contagion propagation,...

Conceptual ambiguities and statistical weaknesses hamper the assessment of external competitiveness. The term competitiveness, while applied extensively, is often imprecisely defined, which can result in analytical errors and mistaken policy advice. Furthermore, aggregate statistical measures of...

This paper uses the financial crisis of 2008 as a natural experiment to demonstrate that when measuring investment-cash flow sensitivity, the value of a firm's assets that can be used as collateral should be taken into account. Using panel data on U.S. firms from 1990 to 2011, it was found that...

Net capital flows to emerging Asia rebounded at a record pace following the global financial crisis, raising concerns about overheating and financial stability. This paper documents the size and composition of the most recent surge to Asian emerging markets from a historical perspective and...