It is likely that such a crisis could not be born somewhere else only in the United States. The "current financial disaster" is the fruit of the combination of specific factors in the US, where elements were gathered to catalyse such a crisis, like, someway, some "primal soup" where were...

In 1991, Congress passed the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act (FDICIA). The Act provided for risk-based deposit insurance premiums, put explicit limits on the application of a “too big to fail” principle for banks and required that examiners implement “prompt...

Since banks are among the most important sources not only of finance but also of external governance for firms, the corporate governance of banks is a crucial factor for growth and development. Despite its importance, this topic has been explored only by a few studies. While some authors...

In this year, new capital adequacy regulation, known as Basel II, came into force. Based on these rules, two directives of the European Parliament and of the Council have been revised and the new decree of Czech National Bank has come into force. This new decree brings some new aspects in credit...

I develop a dynamic model of bank runs that allows me to study important phenomena such as the role of information externalities and herd behavior of depositors as a source of bank runs. I show that eliminating bank runs completely, even they can be generated by herd behavior of depositors, has...

I use the stochastic frontier methodology to estimate a cost and a profit frontier functions. The Fourier-flexible form is used in this paper because of its flexibility. Results show that, although foreign banks are more cost efficient than domestic banks, domestic banks are more profit...

In crisis times, depositors get anxious, can run on banks, and withdraw their deposits. Correlated withdrawals of bank deposits could be mitigated if bank deposits are more diversified, i.e. held by more individuals. This paper examines the link between a broader access to bank deposits prior to...

This study provides a link between accounting, managerial discretion and monetary policy. Monetary authorities encourage banking institutions to supply credit to the economy. Increased bank supply of credit is a good thing but too much of a good can be a bad thing. This paper investigates under...

With a sample of 354 U.S. large bank holding companies, this paper investigates the determination of financial distress in financial institutions. We find that: (1) the house price index is consistently significant and positively associated with the Distance-to-Default (DD) measure in the U.S....

Text presented at the 19ª Asamblea Anual del Grupo Regional de América Latina y el Caribe (GRULAC), of the World Savings Banks Institute, La Habana, Cuba, 4-5 November 2013. It mentions some of the more recent international reform initiatives in particular those linked to the Basel Committee...