This paper analyses the characteristics and functioning of real estate markets. It focuses on the relationship between developments in these markets and the financial sector to determine under what circumstances real estate booms and busts can develop and how they can affect the health and...

Stress testing is a useful and increasingly popular, yet sometimes misunderstood, method of analyzing the resilience of financial systems to adverse events. This paper aims to help demystify stress tests, and illustrate their strengths and weaknesses. Using an Excel-based exercise with...

Drawing from a unique data set comprising 2,893 banks and 152 countries over the period 1987 to 2000, we test whether the adoption of the Basel Accord by Latin American and Caribbean countries was responsible for the serious slowdowns in credit growth experienced by these countries. We find...

This paper takes stock of the current state of development of the financial systems in five Central European transition economies (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, the Slovak Republic, and Slovenia) that are also leading EU accession candidates. It presents both a progress report and an...

The increased presence of foreign banks in a country's domestic banking system necessitates the development of effective cross-border prudential supervision where the consolidated supervision is the essential element. This paper presents foreign bank supervision in terms of division of...

This paper reviews trends in bank lending to the private sector, with a particular focus on Central and Eastern European countries, and finds that rapid growth of private sector credit continues to be a key challenge for most of these countries. The paper discusses possible implications for...

This paper derives risk indicators for the major Chilean banks based on contingent claims analysis, an extension of Black-Scholes-Merton option-pricing theory. These risk indicators are clearly tied to macroeconomic and financial developments in Chile and outside, but bank responses are highly...

This paper reviews the nature of central bank involvement in 26 episodes of financial disturbance and crises in Latin America from the mid-1990s onwards. It finds that, except in a handful of cases, large amounts of central bank money were used to cope with large and small crises alike. Pouring...

The volume of credit extended by a bank can be an informative signal of its abilities in loan selection and management. It is shown that, under asymmetric information, banks may therefore rationally lend more than they would otherwise in order to demonstrate their quality, thus negatively...

This paper uses a Merton-type estimate of the probability of default (PoD) for the main banks in a sample of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and middle-income countries as a proxy for the fragility of their banking systems. Based on theory and stylized facts, the paper...