The paper focuses on the proximate causes of the Finnish savings and cooperative banks' non-performing assets in the current banking crisis. Specifically, the effects of the lending structure at the outset of the crisis and the rate of growth of lending in the latter half of the 1980s are...

In this paper, we investigate the relationship between the transparency of banks and the fragility of the banking system. We show that information-based bank runs may be inefficient because the deposit con-tract designed to provide liquidity induces depositors to have excessive incentives to...

Although it is widely acknowledged that the benefits of corporate governance reform could be substantial, systematic evidence on such reforms is scant. We both document and evaluate a contemporary corporate governance reform by constructing 18 measures of shareholder and creditor protection for...

Although beneficial allocational effects have been a central motivation for the Basel II capital adequacy reform, the interaction of these effects with Basel II’s procyclical impact has been less discussed. In this paper, we investigate the effect of Basel II on the efficiency of bank lending....

This paper examines labour productivity levels and growth rates in 10 EMU economies: Germany, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Austria, Finland, Ireland and Portugal. In general, European economies still lag behind the United States in terms of productivity level. Available estimates...

Making use of ten years of daily data, this paper examines whether banking sector co-movements be-tween the three largest Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) can be attributed to contagion or to interdependence. Our tests based on simple unadjusted correlation analysis uncover...

Over the last decade, the legal and institutional frameworks governing central banks and financial market regulatory authorities throughout the world have undergone significant changes. This has created new interest in better understanding the roles played by organizational structures,...

We ask which part of the observed cross-country differences in the level of per capita income can be accounted for by monopoly rights in the labour market. We answer this question in a calibrated growth model with two final goods sectors. The novel feature being that monopoly rights in the...

Recent models of monetary policy have analysed the desirability of different optimal and ad hoc interest-rate rules under the restrictive assumption that forecasts of the private sector and central bank are homogeneous. In this paper, we study from a learning perspective the implications of...

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...