This paper examines the financial-stability challenges that will most likely be faced by European emerging-market countries in adapting to the post-crises environment, including the new financial-stability architecture and the other remaining weaknesses revealed by the global and European...

Whether the likelihood of a credit boom ending is dependent on its age or not, or whether the respective behavior is smooth or bumpy are important issues to which the economic literature has not given attention yet. This paper tries to fill that gap, exploring those issues with a proper duration...

In an international context, this paper analyzes the main drivers of Brazil's bank spreads measured by the net interest margin, by estimating internationally comparable measures for (i) institutional and regulatory (micro-) factors; (ii) macro-economic factors; and (iii) banking competition...

This paper distinguishes among various types of capital and examines their effect on system-wide fragility. The analysis finds that higher quality forms of capital reduce the systemic risk contribution of banks, whereas lower quality forms can have a destabilizing impact, particularly during...

This paper examines the extent of international consumption risk sharing for a group of 50 industrial and developing countries. The analysis is based on the empirical implementation of a model of partial consumption insurance whose parameters have the natural interpretation of coefficients of...

This paper uses Ethiopian data to explore credit rationing in semi-formal credit markets and its effects on farmers'resource allocation and crop productivity. Credit rationing -- both voluntarily and involuntarily -- is found to be widespread in the sampled rural villages, largely because of...

This paper analyzes the lending behavior of foreign-owned banks during the recent global crisis. Using bank-level panel data for countries in Central and Eastern Europe, East Asia, and Latin America, the paper explores the role of affiliate and parent financial characteristics, host location, as...

This study provides empirical evidence on the strengthening of the impact of house prices on the US macroeconomy. The stability of the house prices macro-link is tested in a small-dimensional vector autoregressive model over the last fifty years. The estimated break-points are used to split the...

The Subprime crisis largely resulted from failures to internalize systemic risk evenly across financial intermediaries and recognize the implications of Knightian uncertainty and mood swings. A successful reform of prudential regulation will need to integrate more harmoniously the three...

This paper studies whether compliance with the Basel Core Principles for effective banking supervision is associated with bank soundness. Using data for more than 3,000 banks in 86 countries, the authors find that neither the overall index of compliance with the Basel Core Principles nor the...