Developments during the global financial crisis have highlighted the importance of differentiating across financial systems and institutions. Assessments of financial stability have increasingly considered the characteristics of individual banks within a financial system, as well as those with...

Thailand had to endure three major shocks during 2008–2011: the global financial crisis, the Japanese earthquake, and the Thai floods of 2011. Over this period, consistent with its inflation targeting framework, the Bank of Thailand (BOT) let the exchange rate depreciate and cut interest...

Although cross-border bank lending has fallen sharply since the crisis, extending our bank ownership database from 1995-2009 up to 2013 shows only limited retrenchment in foreign bank presence. While banks from OECD countries reduced their foreign presence (but still represent 89% of foreign...

This paper provides a comprehensive, global database of deposit insurance arrangements as of 2013. We extend our earlier dataset by including recent adopters of deposit insurance and information on the use of government guarantees on banks’ assets and liabilities, including during the...

Asia proved to be remarkably resilient in the face of the global financial crisis, but why was its output performance stronger than that of other regions? The paper shows that better initial conditions—in the form of lower external and financial vulnerabilities—contributed...

Stock markets play a key role in corporate financing in Asia. However, despite their increasing importance in terms of size and cross-border investment activity, the region’s markets are reputed to be more “idiosyncratic†and less reliant on economic and corporate fundamentals...

This paper presents new evidence on the behavior of saving in the world, by extending previous empirical research in five dimensions. First, it is based on a very large and recent database, covering 165 countries from 1981 to 2012. Second, it conducts a robustness analysis across different...

This paper reviews the literature on financial crises focusing on three specific aspects. First, what are the main factors explaining financial crises? Since many theories on the sources of financial crises highlight the importance of sharp fluctuations in asset and credit markets, the paper...

Volatility in Italian sovereign spreads has increased since mid-2011. This paper finds that news on the euro area debt crisis and country specific events were important drivers of sovereign spreads. Movements in sovereign spreads affect CDS spreads and bond yields of Italian banks, and are...

We examine the properties of house price fluctuations across 18 advanced economies over the past 40 years. We ask two specific questions: First, how synchronized are housing cycles across these countries? Second, what are the main shocks driving movements in global house prices? To address these...