Rollover risk imposes market discipline on banks’ risk-taking behavior but it can be socially costly. I present a two-sided model in which a bank simultaneously lends to a firm and borrows from the short-term funding market. When the bank is capital constrained, uncertainty in asset...

I study whether firms' reliance on intangible assets is an important determinant of financing constraints. I construct new measures of firm-level physical and intangible assets using accounting information on U.S. public firms. I find that firms with a higher share of intangible assets in total...

Existing economic indicators and indexes assess economic activity but no single indicator measures the general macro-economic performance of a nation, state, or region in a methodologically simple and intuitive way. This paper proposes a simple, yet informative metric called the Economic...

The GCC countries maintain a policy of open capital accounts and a pegged (or nearly-pegged) exchange rate, thereby reducing their freedom to run an independent monetary policy. This paper shows, however, that the pass-through of policy rates to retail rates is on the low side, reflecting the...

Over the past decade policy makers in Latin America have adopted a number of macroprudential instruments to manage the procyclicality of bank credit dynamics to the private sector and contain systemic risk. Reserve requirements, in particular, have been actively employed. Despite their...

This paper studies the linkage between structural coherence and economic growth. Structural coherence is defined as the degree that a country's industrial structure optimally reflects its factor endowment fundamentals. The paper found that at least for the overall capital, the shares of capital...

Large fiscal financing needs, both in advanced and emerging market economies, have often been met by borrowing heavily from domestic banks. As public debt approached sustainability limits in a number of countries, however, high bank exposure to sovereign risk created a fragile inter-dependence...

This paper focuses on the coordination problem among borrowing countries imposing controls on capital infl ows. In a simple model of capital flows and controls, we show that inflow restrictions distort international capital flows to other countries and that, in turn, such capital flow deflection...

Countries implementing International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) for loan loss provisioning by banks have been guided by two different approaches: International Accounting Standards (IAS) 39 and Basel standards. This paper discusses the different accounting and regulatory approaches in...

Despite revisions to bank capital standards, fundamental shortcomings remain: the rules for setting capital requirements need to be simpler, and resolution should be an essential part of the capital requirement framework.We propose a new system of capital regulation that addresses these needs by...