We suggest a new transmission channel of contagion on the interbank market, namely the liquidity channel. We apply this idea to the Russian banking sector and .nd that the liquidity channel contributes signi.cantly to a better understanding and prediction of actual interbank market crises....

In this paper we investigate the determinants of bank interest margins in Central and Eastern European countries (CEEC). We try to assess to what extent the weak performance of many banks in transition economies can be attributed to a low degree of efficiency and non-competitive market...

The Russian banking sector experienced considerable turmoil in the late 1990s, especially around the Russian banking crisis in 1998. The question is what types of banks are vulnerable to shocks and whether or not bank-specific characteristics can be used to predict vulnerability to failures. In...

The original Panjer recursion of the CreditRisk+ model is said to be unstable and therefore to yield inaccurate results of the tail distribution of credit portfolios. A much-hailed solution for the flaws of the Panjer recursion is the saddlepoint approximation method. In this paper we show that...

A considerable number of Western European banks have acquired banks in Central and Eastern Europe from the mid-1990s onwards. The question is whether or not this will improve the efficiency and profitability of the Central and Eastern European banking sectors. We test the relative strength of...

Creditors are often passive because they are reluctant to show bad debts on their own balance sheets. In transition economies this problem is particularly severe. In this note, we analyze a simple general equilibrium model, which allows to study the externality effect of creditor passivity. The...

This article analyses how FDI influences labour productivity of domestic firms in Hungary. We find that foreign firms perform better than local firms. The presence of foreign firms has a positive spillover effect on labour productivity of local firms in the same sector, specifically in very open...

In a partial adjustment framework the observed FDI stock is the result of two driving forces. First, the stock converges towards its equilibrium level, even without policy changes. Second, the equilibrium level itself is driven by changes in its determinants. By means of a dynamic panel data...

We use a unique dataset to analyze the contract renegotiation between a debtor and its secured bank creditors during Belgian court-supervised reorganization. We find that secured banks with higher collateralization succeed in renegotiating higher debt repayments during the court-supervised...

This paper develops and estimates a small macroeconomic model of the Russian economy. The model is tailored to analyze the impact of the oil price, the exchange rate, private sector confidence and fiscal policy on economic performance. The model does very well in explaining Russia’s recent...