An intense process of deregulation and financial liberalization in Latin America has increased competitive pressures and led to bank restructuring and consolidation. This paper looks at firm access to credit in the region, focusing on the role of credit market structure. Using firm-level data...

We analyze the effects on bank valuation of government policies aimed at shoring up banks' financial conditions during the 2008-2009 financial crisis. Governments injected into troubled institutions massive amounts of fresh capital and/or guaranteed bank assets and liabilities. We employ event...

The ultimate point of origin of the great financial crisis of 2007-2009 can be traced back to an extremely indebted US economy. The collapse of the real estate market in 2006 was the close point of origin of the crisis. The failure rates of subprime mortgages were the first symptom of a credit...

Financial products are unstandardized and subject to a great deal of uncertainty. They tend to concentrate geographically because of the reduction in information costs resulting from close contacts. Concentration leads to economies of scale and encourages external economies. Great financial...

This paper examines government policies aimed at rescuing banks from the effects of the great financial crisis of 2007-2009. To delimit the scope of the analysis, we concentrate on the fiscal side of interventions and ignore, by design, the monetary policy reaction to the crisis. The policy...

The historical record shows that financial crises are far from being a rare a phenomenon; they occur often enough to be considered part of the workings of finance capitalism. While there is no single hypothesis that can best explain all crises, the implications of the credit boom-and-bust...

This paper surveys the recent literature on the links between public debt and economic growth in advanced economies. We find that theoretical models yield ambiguous results. Whether high levels of public debt have a negative effect on long-run growth is thus an empirical question. While many...

A major policy issue is whether troubles in the banking system re ected in the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 have spurred a credit crunch and, if so, how and why its severity has been different across markets and firms. In this paper, we tackle this issue by looking at the...

The global financial crisis, the weakening role of the dollar and the increasing importance of China in the global arena are calling for a reform of the international monetary system (IMS) in the direction of a greater multilateralism. We agree with the necessity to reform the IMS and we advance...

This paper uses an instrumental variable approach to study whether public debt has a causal effect on economic growth in a sample of OECD countries. The results are consistent with the existing literature that has found a negative correlation between debt and growth. However, the link between...