Politics and regulatory capture can play an important role in financial institutions'distress. East Asia's financial crisis featured many distressed and closed financial intermediaries in an environment with many links between government, politicians, supervisors, and financial institutions....

The authors test for emerging economies, the hypothesis - previously verified only for the Group of 10 (G-10) countries - that enforcing bank capital asset requirements, exerts a negative effect on the supply of credit. Their econometric analysis of data on individual banks, suggests three main...

Taking the Korean experience as a laboratory experiment in systemic financial crises, the authors analyze distress in individual institutions among two groups of financial intermediaries. They pool together a group of large financial intermediaries (commercial banks, merchant banking...

The authors suggest that the credit channel - as a transmitter of monetary and financial shocks - appears to have aggravated the Republic of Korea's economic crisis. They use micro-data gathered at the bank level to better identify this channel of transmission. They find that: 1) Monetary...

Using historical data on sovereign and individual borrowers, the authors assess the potential impact on non-high-income countries of linking capital asset requirements for banks to private sector ratings, as the Basel committee has proposed. They show that linking bank's capital asset...

A systemic financial crisis with monetary restriction is probably the most promising occasion for assessing whether, and to what extent, relationship banking is valuable to borrowers. The authors take this question to a unique database of credit bureau, microeconomic information covering the...

The debates surrounding the recent East Asian crisis have focused not only on causes but also on policy actions in the wake of the initial shock. This has raised questions about the relationship between monetary policy and market confidence. Specifically, would rising interest rates bolster or...

The issue of the credit crunch in the aftermath of the Asian crisis has stimulated much debate. Indeed, some features of the East Asian economies, such as bank-based financial systems and high leverage, make them particularly vulnerable to monetary and financial shocks. Under such circumstances,...