The paper finds that, given New Zealand's conservative approach in implementing the Basel II framework, New Zealand banks' headline capital ratios underestimate their capital strength. A comparison with Canadian, UK and Australian banks highlights the impact of New Zealand's more conservative...

Assessing when credit is excessive is important to understand macro-financial vulnerabilities and guide macroprudential policy. The Basel Credit Gap (BCG) - the deviation of the credit-to-GDP ratio from its long-term trend estimated with a one-sided Hodrick-Prescott (HP) filter - is the...

The structure of the financial system in Indonesia is examined through the analytical lens of the system`s contribution to the growth, stability, and efficiency of the Indonesian economy. The focus is on the banking system and securities markets, which are the primary mechanisms for mobilizing...

Credit is key to support healthy and sustainable economic growth but excess aggregate credit growth can signal the build-up of imbalances and lead to systemic financial crisis. Hence, monitoring the credit cycle is key to identifying vulnerabilities, particularly in emerging markets, which tend...

This paper assesses the resilience of Panamanian banks to (i) a very severe short-term, and (ii) a significant long-lasting liquidity shock scenario. Short-term liquidity buffers are evaluated by approximating the Liquidity Coverage Ratio (LCR) defined in the Basel III accord. The risk of losing...

Financial inclusion has been one of the key pillars of Colombia's development strategy for anumber of years. Financial inclusion policies have aimed at channeling microcredit to poor,spreading formal banking system usage, fostering electronic payment acceptance, andmaking financial services more...

In this paper, we discuss whether and how bank lobbying can lead to regulatory capture and have real consequences through an overview of the motivations behind bank lobbying and of recent empirical evidence on the subject. Overall, the findings are consistent with regulatory capture, which...

Europe's high pre-existing level of financial development can partly account for the relatively smaller reach of fintech payment and lending activities compared to some other regions. But fintech activity is growing rapidly. Digital payment schemes are expanding within countries, although...

We study how investors account for the riskiness of banks' risk-weighted assets (RWA) by examining the determinants of stock returns and market measures of risk. We find that banks with higher RWA had lower stock returns over the US and European crises. This relationship is weaker in Europe...

Outside of financial crises, investors have little incentive to produce private information on banks' short-term liabilities held as information-insensitive safe assets. The same does not hold true during crises. We measure daily information production using data from credit default swap spreads...