In autumn of 2007 Britain experienced its first bank run of any significance since the reign of Queen Victoria. The run was on a bank called Northern Rock. This was extraordinary, for Britain had been free of such episodes because by early in the third quarter of the 19th century the Bank of...

This paper continues the data collection procedure and analysis set forth in Nyberg and Vaihekoski (2009). A number of new time series that are commonly used in finance literature are collected, created, and analyzed for the first time. These series include, among others, monthly dividend yields...

This paper gathers the longest available historical monthly return series for the Finnish equity, bond and money markets as well as inflation. The series are analysed to calculate the statistical characteristics of the returns investors would have received in these markets. We also survey...

This paper presents a new monthly value-weighted, all-share total return index for the Finnish stock market. The index covers the period from the establishment of the Helsinki Stock Exchange in October 1912 to the beginning of 1970, after which the WI index by Berglund et al (1983) and later in...

Recently, banking literature has had a quest for appropriate pricing of bank loans under the new Basel II rules and has been in pursuit of possible outcomes for undertaking such credit risk. In this paper, we propose a simplified formula to price bank’s corporate loans, aiming at making bank...

We study the long standing issue of whether markets can supply banks with sufficient liquidity or whether markets should be complemented with a lender of last resort (LOLR). For this purpose, we develop an extended version of the recent model of Holmström and Tirole (1998) on the supply of...

China is reforming its banking system, partially privatizing and permitting minority foreign ownership of three of the dominant ‘big four’ state-owned banks. This paper seeks to help predict the effects of this change by analysing the efficiency of virtually all Chinese banks in the years...

Transparency regulation aims at reducing financial fragility by strengthening market discipline. There are however two elementary properties of banking that may render such regulation inefficient at best and detrimental at worst. First, an extensive financial safety net may eliminate the...

The banking system is known to be vulnerable to self-fulfilling crises that are caused by depositors’ coordination failure. We show that transparency regulation may prevent certain types of systemic crises by eliminating the possibility of the coordination failure.

Recent cross-country comparisons of bank efficiency have been based on pooled estimates of banks across countries and have typically assumed a common frontier and that differences in performance among banks are primarily due to disparities in certain country-specific aspects of banking...