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...

We examine whether examiners were informed and contributed to the health of the banking sector. Information included quantitative information that was eventually made public, quantitative information that remained private, and subjective information dependent on the examiner's production of...

This paper supplies an agency-cost and contestable-markets perspective on the financial policies that triggered the Asian financial crisis. The agency-cost analysis hypothesizes that individual-country regulators knew that politically directed loans had made their banks insolvent, but...