The document estimates the risk embraced by Colombian commercial banks, and establishes a measurement of excessive risk-taking that is consistent with such estimation. The construction of the excessive-risk measurement follows the basic efficient-portfolio framework, in which the variance of an...

The global crisis exposed weaknesses in the Hungarian financial system that pose risks to financial stability. Excessive risk-taking by banks and households had been masked by relatively stable exchange rates, the expected early adoption of the euro and unusually lax credit conditions in...

This paper reformulates the well known financial development conjecture (FDC) and supplies some new empirical evidence in its favour. The financial development conjecture, namely, that there exist strong feedback effects between real and financial development, is described in this paper by use...

The paper shows that traditional specialization of the Italian banking sector can explain its attenuated involvement in the financial crisis as well as its increasing difficulties to face the consequent 'real' crisis and the European crisis of the sovereign debts. However this same...

Economists may need to change their tools of analysis from analysing income and expenditure contributors (GDP) to asset value contributors -the net worth levels of individual households-. Assessment of the latter requires a balance sheet analysis. Why; because the level of individual...

We develop a growth model with banks and markets to reconcile the observed decreasing trend in the relative liquidity of many financial systems around the world with the increasing household participation in direct market trades. At low levels of economic development, the presence of fixed entry...