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...

Building on Cecchetti and Li (2005), we show that the bank lending channel affects monetary policy trade-offs only when interest rates affect marginal costs of production (ie when there is a cost channel of monetary policy) in the New Keynesian monetary policy model. In our calibrated model the...

Differences in growth, productivity and inflation levels are going to be a prominent feature of the future of EMU, as the convergence process is still on-going in the new Member States. This convergence process can be described by the Balassa-Samuelson proposition, which states that faster...

This paper presents a two-sector, two-country model showing that inflation in the housing market, a low personal savings rate, and a construction investment boom can contribute to a large current account deficit. In the model, demand by a group of households in the domestic country is...

This study uses the current financial crisis as a quasi-experiment to examine whether and to what extent corporate boards affect the performance of firms. Using cumulative stock returns over the crisis to measure of firm performance, we find that board independence, as traditionally defined,...

Using the recent financial crisis as a natural quasi-experiment, we test whether and to what extent conservative accounting affects shareholder value. We find that there is significantly positive and economically meaningful relation between conservatism and firm stock performance during the...

Tracing the SEC ban on the short selling of financial stocks in September 2008, this paper investigates whether such selling activity before the 2008 short ban reflected financial companies’ risk exposures in the subprime crisis. The evidence suggests that short sellers sold short stocks that...

On 3 July 2015, SUERF organized its sixth joint conference with the Bank of Finland in Helsinki on the subject of liquidity and market efficiency. The one-day program consisted of an opening speech, six presentations, including three keynotes, and a lunchtime address. The present SUERF Study...

This paper deals with the issue of how the market structure in banking affects the choice of means of payment. In particular, the demand for cash is analysed from this point of view. The analysis is based on a simple spatial transactions model in which the banks’ optimization problem is...