Equilibrium credit is an important concept because it helps to identify excessive credit provision in an economy. This paper proposes a structural approach to determine equilibrium credit which is based on the long-run through-the-cycle transaction demand for credit. Using a panel data set...

This paper studies the economic foundations for maximum leverage ratio capital adequacy rules. The paper makes three contributions to the literature. First, we show how to determine the maximum leverage ratio such that the probability of insolvency is less than some predetermined quantity. Two,...

This paper estimates an early warning system (EWS) for predicting systemic banking crises in a sample of low income countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Since the average duration of crises in this sample of countries is longer than one year, the predictive performance of standard binomial logit...

Central banks (CBs) in Europe and the US have been providing virtually unlimited amounts of liquidity to banks for quite some time now. This may lead banks to expect that these CBs will be lenient in the future. Will this expectation be justified? I present a model in which a commercial bank,...

This article develops a model that studies how the presence of a lender of last resort (LOLR) affects the ex ante investment incentives of banks. We show that a perfectly informed LOLR induces a first-best outcome for small and medium sized banks but causes moral hazard in larger banks given the...

We investigate whether financial markets reacted to the regulatory changes implied by the publication of the list of systemically important financial institutions (SIFI) and the new rules designed to address the too-big-to-fail problem of systemic banks. By applying event study methodology to a...

In this paper, we look at how the pre-crisis health of banks is related to the probability of receiving and repaying TARP capital. We find that financial performance characteristics that are related to the probability of receiving TARP funds differ for the healthiest (“over-achiever”) versus...

This paper addresses the issue on how bank size and market concentration affect performance and risks in 17 Latin American countries between 2001 and 2008. The objective is to evaluate whether a too-big-to-fail behavior has been present in the region. Surprisingly, we do not find evidence to...

The perception that banks are exploiting customers through their fee-charging practices in a bid to maximize profits, has fuelled widespread public interest in identifying the banks that profit most heavily from fees. Using hierarchical cross-country regression analyses, this paper seeks to...

We empirically investigate the effects of market structure on profitability and stability for 1929 banks in 40 emerging and advanced economies over 1999–2008 by incorporating the traditional structure-conduct-performance (SCP) and relative-market-power (RMP) hypotheses. We observe that a...