We exploit regional variation in US house price fluctuations during the boom-bust cycle of the 2000s to study the impact of the housing cycle on young Americans' choices related to education and employment. We find that in MSAs which experienced large increases in house prices between 2001 and...

We document that there are strong complementarities between monetary policy and macroprudential policy in shaping the evolution of bank credit. We use a unique loanlevel dataset comprising multiple credit registers from several European countries and different types of loans, including corporate...

We evaluate the role of insider ownership in shaping banks' equity issuances in response to the global financial crisis. We construct a unique dataset on the ownership structure of U.S. banks and their equity issuances and discover that greater insider ownership leads to less equity issuances....

This paper updates the Demirguc-Kunt and Sobaci (2001) cross-country deposit insurance database and extends it in several important dimensions. This new dataset identifies both recent adopters and the ones that were not covered earlier due to a lack of data. Moreover, for the first time, it...

Using bank-level data, Claessens and Laeven apply the Panzar and Rosse (1987) methodology to estimate the extent to which changes in input prices are reflected in revenues earned by specific banks in 50 countries' banking systems. They then relate this competitiveness measure to indicators of...

We develop a model of insider lending in which a borrower can give incentives to a bank manager to misuse his right of control by extending a loan at favorable rates to the borrower at the expense of the equity value of the bank. The model explains why insider loans often occur to borrowing...

Using credit-registry data for Spain and Peru, we document that four main types of commercial credit—asset-based loans, cash-flow loans, trade finance and leasing—are easily identifiable and represent the bulk of corporate credit. We show that credit dynamics and bank lending channels vary...

We find that capital in the range of 15–23 percent of risk-weighted assets would have been sufficient to absorb losses in the vast majority of historic banking crises in advanced economies. Further capital increases would have had only marginal effects on preventing additional crises....

Recent theoretical models argue that a bank's organizational structure reflects its lending technology. A hierarchically organized bank will employ mainly hard information, whereas a decentralized bank will rely more on soft information. We investigate theoretically and empirically how bank...

The relationships among competition in the financial sector, access of firms to external financing, and associated economic growth are ambiguous in theory. Moreover, measuring competition in the financial sector can be complex. In this paper Claessens and Laeven first estimate for 16 countries a...