Deposit insurance is widely offered in a number of countries as part of a financial system safety net to promote stability. An unintended consequence of deposit insurance is the reduction in the incentive of depositors to monitor banks, which leads to excessive risk-taking. This paper examines...

The global financial crisis brought public guarantees to the forefront of the policy debate. Based on a review of the theoretical foundations of public guarantees, this paper concludes that the commonly used justifications for public guarantees based solely on agency frictions (such as adverse...

Why are emerging economies excessively vulnerable to shocks to external funding? What was the role of financial flows from emerging to developed economies in setting the stage for the subprime crisis? This paper addresses these questions in a simple general equilibrium framework that emphasizes...

This paper examines time-series and cross-country variations in default risk co-dependence in the global banking system. The authors construct a default risk measure for all publicly traded banks using the Merton contingent claim model, and examine the evolution of the correlation structure of...

Did the U.S. government's intervention in the Chrysler reorganization overturn bankruptcy law? Critics argue that the government-sponsored reorganization impermissibly elevated claims of the auto union over those of Chrysler's other creditors. If the critics are correct, businesses might suffer...

This paper examines how corporate governance and executive compensation affected bank capitalization strategies for an international sample of banks in 2003-2011."Good"corporate governance, which favors shareholder interests, is found to give rise to lower bank capitalization. Boards of...

This paper proposes a measure of the extent to which a financial sector is connected to the real economy. The Measure of Connectedness is a measure of the composition of assets, namely the share of credit to the non-financial sectors over the total credit market instruments. The aggregate...

The paper is about the art of exchange rate management by central banks. It begins by reviewing the diversity of objectives and practices of central bank intervention in the foreign exchange market. Central banks typically exercise discretion in determining when and to what extent to intervene....

Using bank level measures of competition and co-dependence, the authors show a robust positive relationship between bank competition and systemic stability. Whereas much of the extant literature has focused on the relationship between competition and the absolute level of risk of individual...

This paper studies the issue of real exchange rate misalignment and the difficulties in settling international real exchange rate disputes. The authors show theoretically that determining when a country should be sanctioned for real exchange rate"manipulations"is difficult: in some situations a...