This paper endogenizes financial contagion and financial crises from financial institutions. We show that financial crises can emanate from financial institutions which generate soft-budget constraints (SBC). The prevailing SBC in an economy distort in-formation such that the interbank lending...

The fundamental importance of economic institutions for economic growth through their impact on technological change has been argued, reconfirmed by recent empirical studies, but not examined theoretically. This paper tries to fill that gap. In the model proposed, economic growth is affected by...

This paper provides a unified theory to explain the onset of the financial crisis in 1998 and the striking economic recovery in Russia and the former Soviet Union afterwards. Before the crisis, the banking sector in these economies was stuck in a development trap in which the banking sector is...