This paper addresses the following questions: which was the contribution of banks’assets to the US’ expansion in the period until the financial crisis? Did commercial banks respect capital requirements? The two questions are strictly interrelated as, according to a recent literature,...

Using different credit measures, this study identifies the credit booms in Turkey that have occurred after December 2002, and examines their determinants. We find that the primary factors that have a strong correlation with the probability of a credit boom are the changes in the slope of the...

Using a number of theoretical considerations, we define distinct periods of anxiety for key economic agents that are involved in lending decisions; namely, consumers, CEOs, and banks. The main characteristic of anxious periods is that the perceptions and expectations about economic conditions...

Credit procyclicality has recently been the focus of considerable attention, but what fuels the often excessive credit growth is rarely questioned. We investigate the relationship between the composition of banks' liabilities and their credit procyclicality. After examining the macroeconomic...

This paper investigates the effect of capital market development on severity of economic contraction, and probability of economic downturn. The major finding is that countries with deeper capital market would face less severe business cycle output contraction, and lower chance of an economic...

This paper investigates cross-country evidence on how capital market affects business cycle volatility. In contrast to the large and growing literature on the impact of finance and growth, empirical work on the relationship between finance and volatility has been relatively scarce....

This paper investigates the effect of capital market development on the frequency of recession and the fraction of time the economy in recession using quarterly data of thirty-five countries from 1975 to 2004. The main finding is that frequency of recession is not robustly linked to measures of...

This paper documents a large cross-bank and cross-country variation in the relationship between loan loss provisions and the business cycle and explores bank management specific, bank-activity specific and country specific (institutional and regulatory) features that explain this diversity in...

In this paper, we analyze the extent to which past financial crises share common characteristics in Latin America, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. We examine the recent crises in Asia and in Latin America, in particular their severity, to assess whether the considerable historical differences...

The global financial and economic crisis revealed institutional weaknesses and structural problems of particular Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) countries. The crisis and slowdown that followed had an impact on their relative competitiveness. Financial and economic turbulences of recent years...