This paper studies the cyclical pattern of ex post markups in the banking system using balance-sheet data for a large set of countries. Markups are strongly countercyclical even after controlling for financial development, banking concentration, operational costs, inflation, and simultaneity or...

Financial stability is an important policy objective since crises are associated with big economic, social, and political costs. Promoting stability requires preventing “sudden stops” in capital flows, which are events in which foreign financing abruptly disappears. This paper contributes to...

We identify structural vector autoregressions using narrative sign restrictions. Narrative sign restrictions constrain the structural shocks and the historical decomposition around key historical events, ensuring that they agree with the established narrative account of these episodes. Using...

This paper examines the implications that alternative regulatory structures may have for resolving failed banking institutions. We place our emphasis on the European Union (EU), which is both economically and financially large and has several features relating to cross-border banking in the form...

This paper examines the negative externalities that may occur when a large bank fails, describes the nature of those externalities, and explores whether they may be greater in a case involving a large cross-border banking organization. The analysis suggests that the chief negative externalities...

We survey the theories of why banks promise to pay par on demand and examine evidence about the conditions under which banks have promised to pay the par value of deposits and banknotes on demand when holding only fractional reserves. The theoretical literature can be broadly divided into four...