Several transition economies have undertaken fiscal decentralization reforms over the past two decades along with liberalization, privatization, and stabilization reforms. Theory predicts that decentralization may aggravate fiscal imbalances, unless the right incentives are in place to promote...

Banks' liquidity holdings are comfortably above legal or prudential requirements in most Central American countries. While good for financial stability, high systemic liquidity may nonetheless hinder monetary policy transmission and financial markets development. Using a panel of about 100...

The Global Financial Crisis unleashed changes in the operating and regulatory environments for large international banks. This paper proposes a novel taxonomy to identify and track business model evolution for the 30 Global Systemically Important Banks (G-SIBs). Drawing from banks' reporting, it...

This paper explores the determinants of profitability across large euro area banks using a novel approach based on conditional profitability distributions. Real GDP growth and the NPL ratio are shown to be the most reliable determinants of bank profitability. However, the estimated conditional...

We present a model that describes how different types of bank regulation can interact to affect the likelihood of fire sales in a crisis. In our model, risk shifting motives drive how banks recapitalize following a negative shock, leading banks to concentrate their portfolios. Regulation affects...

Drawing on the 2016 update of the IMF's Central Bank Legislation Database, this paper examines differences in central bank legal frameworks before and after the Global Financial Crisis. Examples from select countries show that many central bank laws have undergone changes in objectives,...

This paper presents recent trends in bank ownership across countries and summarizes the evidence regarding the implications of bank ownership structure for bank performance and competition, financial stability, and access to finance. The evidence reviewed suggests that foreign-owned banks are...

Once upon a time, in the 1990s, it was widely agreed that neither Europe nor the United States was an optimum currency area, although moderating this concern was the finding that it was possible to distinguish a regional core and periphery (Bayoumi and Eichengreen, 1993). Revisiting these...

We present a novel approach that incorporates individual entity stress testing and losses from systemic risk effects (SE losses) into macroprudential stress testing. SE losses are measured using a reduced-form model to value financial entity assets, conditional on macroeconomic stress and the...

The aim of this paper is twofold: first, to study the determinants of banks' net interest margin with a particular focus on the role of maturity transformation, using a new measure of maturity mismatch; second, to analyse the implications for banks from the relaxation of a binding prudential...