We find that the Global Financial Crisis (2007-2009) had an adverse effect on employee mental health. To identify the causal effects of the credit shock, we exploit the plausibly exogenous variation in firms’ need to refinance their long-term debt in 2008, a period when refinancing became more...

Should central banks increase their degree of transparency any further? We show that there is likely to be an optimal intermediate degree of central bank transparency. Up to this optimum more transparency is desirable: it improves the quality of private sector inflation forecasts. But beyond the...

We use detailed survey data to document stark differences between West and East Ukraine when it comes to household attitudes toward market-based economies and democratic institutions. Along both of these dimensions, Eastern Ukrainians are decidedly less supportive of liberal systems. We also...

We examine how liquidity is exchanged in different types of Colombian money market networks (i.e. secured, unsecured, and central bank's repo networks). Our examination first measures and analyzes the centralization of money market networks. Afterwards, based on a simple network optimization...

The effect of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) has been substantial across markets and countries worldwide. We examine how the GFC has changed the way equity markets group together based on the similarity of stock indices' daily returns. Our examination is based on agglomerative clustering...

We implement a modified version of DebtRank, a measure of systemic impact inspired in feedback centrality, to recursively measure the contagion effects caused by the default of a selected financial institution. In our case contagion is a liquidity issue, measured as the decrease in financial...

We study the international transmission of shocks from the banking to the real sector during the global financial crisis. For identification, we use matched bank-firm level data, covering mainly small and medium-sized firms in Eastern Europe and Turkey, and exploit the Lehman failure. We find...

As a result of the recent financial crisis and the ensuing economic recession, fiscal deficits have soared in many OECD countries. As a consequence, government debt has been on the rise again after a period of stable or declining government debt. In this paper we analyze debt stabilization in a...

Does better corporate governance unambiguously improve the risk/return efficiency of banks? Or does either a re-orientation of banks' revenue mix towards more opaque products, an economic downturn, or tighter supervision create off-setting or reinforcing effects? The authors relate bank...

Calvin's view on the legitimacy of interest has had a great impact on the economic development of Western society. Although Calvin took a fundamentally positive attitude to interest, he also proposed several restrictions on the charging of interest. In this article, we investigate the relevance...