The 20th century consensus regarding the role of a central bank – to maintain price stability was upset by the global financial crisis of 2007-2009. Central banks changed their mode of behavior and new regulatory structures were introduced around the world. In this essay, I examine one of the...

In the years prior to the financial crisis of 2008-09, the Federal Reserve and other central banks emphasized their macroeconomic policy role almost to the exclusion of other concerns. The crisis experience has led to profound changes in the way we view central banking. Central banking in the...

This paper tracks the development of sectoral saving and borrowing in the US economy over the past 50 years. We show that the financial imbalances that erupted in the financial crisis of 2008 were long in the making and preceded the emergence of global imbalances in the 2000s. The record low...

To investigate the impact of bank privatization in transition countries, we take the largest banks in six relatively advanced countries, namely, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Hungary, Poland and Romania. Income and balance sheet characteristics are compared across four bank ownership...

To investigate the impact of bank privatization in transition countries, we take the largest banks in six relatively advanced countries, namely, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Hungary, Poland and Romania. Income and balance sheet characteristics are compared across four bank ownership...

This paper explores how the legal environment affects bank behavior in 20 transition economies. Based on a newly constructed data set we find that banks loan portfolio composition depends on the legal environment. If banks operate in a well-functioning legal environment they lend relatively more...

Although the performance and privatization of transition banks have been widely studiedalready, little is known about their risk taking and risk management activities. We use a new EBRD survey data set of banks to examine risk taking by banks in the transition countries. We find no indication of...

There have been profound changes in both political and economic institutions in China over the last twenty years. Moreover, the pace of transition has led to variation across the country in the level of development. In this paper, we use panel data for the Chinese provinces to study the role of...

We examine the efforts of transition economies to deal with financial fragility and resolve banking cries We characterize the birthing process of banking in transition and the three essential features of banking crises in transition economies: (i) bad loans and the relationship to state owned...

Although the finance-growth nexus has become firmly entrenched in the empirical literature, studies that question the strength of the empirical results have appeared and seem to have become more frequent as well. In this paper we reexamine the core crosscountry panel results that established the...