The current financial crisis, which has lasted almost one and a half years, is the 19th such crisis in the post-war period in advanced economies. Recent literature classifies the Nordic crises in Norway, Sweden and Finland in late 1980's and early 1990’s among the Big Five crises that have...

In this article we provide a summary of empirical results obtained in several economics and operations research papers that attempt to explain, predict, or suggest remedies for financial crises or banking defaults, as well as outlines of the methodologies used. We analyze financial and economic...

Building on the work of Sorge and Virolainen (2006), we revisit the data on aggregate Finnish bank loan losses from the corporate sector, which covers the ‘Big Five’ crisis in Finland in the early 1990s. Several extensions to the empirical model are considered. These extensions are then used...

Using the maximum entropy method, this paper estimates the danger of contagion in the Finnish interbank market in 2005–2007 as well as the existence of contagion during a Finnish banking crisis. The contagion analysis of the early 1990s is able to predict the most troublesome and defaulting...

The global financial crisis of 2007–2008 has given rise to new regulatory initiatives to put restrictions on the size and the term of bankers' pay. We revisit both theoretically and empirically the question of whether these regulations are justified. We model bonuses as a series of sequential...

This paper analyses the importance of individual bank-specific factors on financial stability. First, we use a novel method to model the spreading of the contagion in the interbank network by implementing an epidemiologic model. Actual data on European banks is exploited with simulated...

Failure in bank corporate governance has been seen as a contributing factor to excessive risk-taking pre-crisis with devastating implications as risks realised during the financial crisis. Unfortunately, the empirical evidence on the impact of managerial incentives on bank crisis performance is...

We model a banker's future bonuses as a series of call options on the bank's profits and show that bonus caps and deferrals reduce risk-taking. However, the banker's optimal risk-taking also depends on the costs of risk-taking. We calibrate the model to US banking data and show that lengthening...

This paper analyses different operational central bank policies and their impact on the behaviour of the money market interest rate. The model combines profit maximising behaviour by commercial banks with the central bank supplying the liquidity that keeps the market rate on target. It seems...