It has been argued that central bank independence (CBI) may not only be beneficial for reaching the objective of price stability, but also for maintaining financial stability. Greater independence from external pressure implies that central banks are less politically constrained in acting to...

Using data for more than 160 countries in the period 1997–2010, we explore the impact of large-scale natural disasters on the distance-to-default of commercial banks. The financial consequences of natural catastrophes may stress and threaten the existence of a bank by adversely affecting their...

We examine the effectiveness of the financial sector rescue packages provided by the national governments during the 2008 financial crisis. This study questions the implicit assumption that government interventions have an uniform effect on the default risk of individual banks. After testing the...

What does the general public know about banking supervision? What objectives does the public think bank supervisors should pursue? We investigate these issues using a survey among Dutch households. First, we find that the public's knowledge about banking supervision is far from perfect. We also...

We analyze three databases of banking crises and investigate their consistency in the identification and timing of crises. We find that there are large and statistically significant discrepancies between the datasets. We also compare the dating of banking crises according to these databases...