While South Korea and Thailand had relatively sustainable fiscal policies prior to the Asian crisis, the long-term cost of the bailout of their financial sectors amounted to an estimated 30 to 40 percent of output, which was largely financed by public borrowing. The recent credit expansions in...

This paper studies a banking industry subject to common and idiosyncratic shocks. We compare two types of regulatory closure rules: (1) an “absolute closure rule,” which closes banks when their asset–liability ratios fall below a given threshold, and (2) a “relative closure rule,”...

This paper reviews the Japanese experience with "put guarantees" recently offered in the sale of several failed banks. These guarantees, meant to address information asymmetry problems, are shown to create moral hazard problems of their own. In particular, the guarantees make acquiring banks...

This paper examines a banking regime similar to the "convoy" scheme which prevailed in Japan through most of the 1990s. Insolvent banks are merged with solvent banks rather than closed, with the acquiring banks required to accept negative value banks at zero value. I demonstrate that a convoy...

This paper conducts a case study of the impact of the May 6, 1997, announcement of enhanced independence of the Bank of England on estimates of expected future inflation and real interest rates. These are generated from observed yields on conventional and index-linked British gilts. For the...

This paper develops an open-economy version of the Bernanke-Blinder model which indicates that sterilization efforts through increases in reserve requirements will have limited impact if viable financial alternatives to the commercial banking sector exist. I then examine the capital inflow surge...

This article introduces a monopolistically competitive model of foreign lending in which both explicit and implicit fixed-premium deposit insurance increase the degree to which bank participation in relending to problem debtors falls below its globally optimal level. This provides a channel for...