This paper examines whether bank ownership (public versus private, domestic versus foreign) is correlated with bank lending behavior over the business cycle. The paper finds that state-owned banks may play a useful credit-smoothing role because their lending is less responsive to macroeconomic...

This paper surveys the theoretical and empirical literature on the role of state-owned banks and also presents some new results and a robustness analysis. The paper shows that state-owned banks located in developing countries have fiscal costs because they are characterized by lower returns than...

The paper uses Minsky's financial instability hypothesis as an analytical framework for understanding the subprime mortgage crisis and for introducing adequate reforms to restore economic stability. We argue that the subprime crisis has structural origins that extend far beyond the housing and...

Longstanding speculation about the likelihood of a housing market collapse has given way in the past few months to consideration of just how far the housing market will fall, and how much damage the debacle will inflict on the economy. This paper assesses the magnitude of the impact of housing...

We study the interest rate spread of the Argentine financial system during the last eighteen years. We analyze Granger causality of selected variables, and estimate econometric models that relate spread to macroeconomic and microeconomic factors. Resuls indicate that output growth and...

We investigate how bank migration across state lines over the last quarter century has affected the size and covariance of business fluctuations within states. Starting with a two-state version of the unit banking model in Holmstrom and Tirole (1997), we conclude that the theoretical effect of...

In this paper, we empirically analyze the transmission of realized interest rate risk - the gain or loss in bank economic capital due to movements in interest rates - to bank lending. We exploit a unique panel data set that contains supervisory information on the repricing maturity profiles of...

The markets for foreign exchange, energy and residential housing have all been strongly affected by the deregulation and expansion of the financial sector. As a result, they have begun to follow the logic of asset markets. This was especially marked in the case of the foreign exchange market...

We take a structural approach to assessing the empirical importance of shocks to the supply of bank-intermediated credit in affecting macroeconomic fluctuations. First, we develop a theoretical model to show how credit supply shocks can be transmitted into disruptions in the production economy....

Bond yield and retail interest rate spreads are presumed to lead real activity on the basis of financial accelerator mechanisms, markup cyclicality or simply because they are forward-looking. Empirical results for Austria show that retail rate spreads outperform many other indicators in this...