This paper summarizes the basic arguments given by professors Christian Bordes, David Currie and Hans Söderström in their reports on the state and behaviour of the Finnish economy prior to mid 1993. The focus is primarily on the analytical frameworks or models used by the professors to...

The paper discusses the possibility that the workings of the financial system contributed the boom-bust cycle in the Finnish credit market since the mid-1980s. We begin with a review of the most prominent theoretical arguments about the role of "financial factors". Also the main findings of a...

We investigate the effects of credit ratings-contingent financial regulation on foreign bank lending behavior. We examine the sensitivity of international bank flows to debtor countries’ sovereign credit rating changes before and after the implementation of the Basel 2 risk-based capital...

The current financial crisis, which has lasted almost one and a half years, is the 19th such crisis in the post-war period in advanced economies. Recent literature classifies the Nordic crises in Norway, Sweden and Finland in late 1980's and early 1990’s among the Big Five crises that have...

This paper tests the hypothesis that the more fragile a banking system is, the more likely it is to experience problems when an unexpected shock hits. The empirical framework where this test is conducted is a reduced form model, where macroeconomic factors explain banks’ loan losses. The...

The macroeconomic determinants of banking sector distresses in the Nordic countries, Belgium, Ger-many, Greece, Spain and the UK are analysed using an econometric model estimated on panel data from partly the early 1980s to 2002. The dependent variable is the ratio of banks’ loan losses to...

This paper tests for the presence of a credit channel (particularly a bank-lending sub-channel) for monetary policy in the housing market. We argue that the importance of this channel for investment in residential housing is highly dependent on the structural features, and particularly the...

This paper presents econometric analyses on the determination of bank deposit and lending rates using longitudinal Finnish data. Interest rate pass-through is very strong, possibly complete, in the case of lending rates; in the case of deposit rates the pass-through is far from complete, even in...

We study whether the mechanism design in the central bank liquidity auctions matters for the interbank money market interest rate levels and volatility. Furthermore, we compare different mechanisms to sell liquidity in terms of revenue, efficiency and auction stage interest rate levels and...