The financial crisis has highlighted the importance of various channels of financial contagion across countries. This paper first presents stylized facts of international banking activities during the crisis. It then describes a simple model of financial contagion based on bank balance sheet...

This paper introduces a new database of financial reforms, covering 91 economies over 1973–2005. It describes the content of the database, the information sources utilized, and the coding rules used to create an index of financial reform. It also compares the database with other measures of...

This paper studies whether compliance with the Basel Core Principles for Effective Banking Supervision (BCPs) improves bank soundness. The authors find a significant and positive relationship between bank soundness (measured with Moody's financial strength ratings) and compliance with principles...