The Indian debt overhang issue is one of the major reasons that fresh investments are currently not being made in the scale required to promote higher growth and boost employment. Among banks the public sector banks (PSBs) are burdened with the bulk of net non-performing loans (NNPAs). These...

This paper studies the extent to which risk-taking incentives of CEOs and other governancefeatures in a range of years prior to the recent financial crisis were related to the write-downsof U.S. financial institutions during the crisis. We document that institutions whose CEOs hadparticularly...

In addition to their direct effects, episodes of financial instability may decrease investor confidence. Measuring the impact of a crisis on investor confidence is complicated by the fact that it is difficult to disentangle the effect of investor confidence from coincident direct effects of the...

During the recent financial crisis, the Federal Reserve implemented a series of extraordinary and unconventional policies to alleviate the impact of the crisis on financial markets and the economy. In this paper, we examine the effects of these policies on broad financial market conditions,...

In August 1763, northern Europe experienced a financial crisis with numerous parallels to the 2008 Lehman Brothers episode. The 1763 crisis was sparked by the failure of a major provider of acceptance loans, a form of securitized credit resembling modern asset-backed commercial paper. The...

We explore how a relatively small amount of heterogeneous securities created turmoil in financial markets in much of the world in 2007 and 2008. The drivers of the financial turmoil and the financial crisis of 2008 were heterogeneous securities that were hard to value. These securities created...

We describe and evaluate the measures taken by the U.S. government to rescue Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in September 2008. We begin by outlining the business model of these two firms and their role in the U.S. housing finance system. Our focus then turns to the sources of financial distress that...

We classify a large sample of banks according to the geographic diversification of their international syndicated loan portfolio. Our results show that diversified banks maintain higher loan supply during banking crises in borrower countries. The positive loan supply effects lead to higher...

Banking models in the tradition of Diamond and Dybvig (1983) rely on sequential service to explain belief-driven runs. But the run-like phenomena witnessed during the financial crisis of 2007-08 occurred in the wholesale shadow banking sector where sequential service is largely absent,...

Although a number of steps have been taken to reduce the risk of financial stability, some significant weaknesses remain. This paper examines whether stricter regulation of incentive compensation is the missing piece needed to reduce risk to acceptable levels. Unfortunately, this review of the...