This paper examines the role of capital in financial institutions. As the introductory article to a conference on the role of capital management in banking and insurance, it describes the authors' views of why capital is important, how market-generated capital requirements' differ from...

The financial system is regulated to achieve a wide variety of purposes. However, the objective that distinguishes financial regulation from other kinds is that of safeguarding the economy against systemic risk. Concerns regarding systemic risk focus largely on banks, which traditionally have...

Traditional explanations of market crashes rely on the collapse of an asset price bubble or the exacerbation of an information asymmetry sufficient to cause less-informed participants to withdraw from the market. We show that markets can crash even though asset prices have not deviated from...

Real estate cycles and banking cycles may occur independently but they are correlated in a remarkable number of instances ranging over a wide variety of institutional arrangements, in both advanced industrial nations and emerging economies. During the recent Asian financial crisis, the most...

Over the last decade interest in the role of finance in economic growth has revived. Building from the pioneering work of Goldsmith (1965) and the insights of Shaw (1973) and McKinnon (1973), the more recent work examines the role of financial institutions and financial markets in corporate...

What distinguished financial institutions from other firms is the relatively small share of real assets on their balance sheets. Thus, the direct impact of financial institutions on the real economy is relatively minor. The indirect impact of financial markets and institutions on economic...