Motivated by agency theory, this study seeks to understand the effect of the country-level national governance system on the extent of corporate risk-taking in the MENA region. The study employs a two-step generalized method of moments (GMM) approach to evaluate the influence of governance...

A view advanced in the aftermath of the late-2000s financial crisis is that lower than optimal interest rates lead to excessive risk taking by financial intermediaries. We evaluate this view in a quantitative dynamic model where interest rate policy affects risk taking by changing the amount of...

Using the monetary model developed in Sissoko (2007), where the general equilibrium assumption that every agent buys and sells simultaneously is relaxed, we observe that in this environment fiat money can implement a Pareto optimum only if taxes are type-specific. We then consider intermediated...

We consider an environment where the general equilibrium assumption that every agent buys and sells simultaneously is relaxed. We show that fiat money can implement a Pareto optimal allocation only if taxes are type-specific. We then consider intermediated money by assuming that financial...

With this paper we seek to contribute to the literature on the relation between finance and growth. We argue that most studies in the field fail to measure the quality of financial intermediation but rather resort to using proxies on the size of financial systems. Moreover, cross-country...

This paper discusses the role of internal corporate ratings as a means by which commercial banks condense their informational advantage and preserve it vis-à-vis a competitive lending market. In drawing on a unique data set collected from leading universal banks in Germany, we are able to...

By introducing a new measure of the banking systems' size, the paper challenges the existing consensus on severe underdevelopment of the CEE banking sectors. We argue that the existing studies on the size of CEE banking systems exaggerate the real degree of underdevelopment because common...

Shocks in the financial sector caused the great recession of 2008 and pulled down the real economy. To implement financial dynamics in a stylized DSGE-framework we use behavioral elements in expectations to produce waves of bull and bear cycles in the financial intermediation process, that have...

This paper provides a unified framework for endogenizing two distinct organizational structures of financial intermediation. In one structure, called Bank, the intermediary is financed by issuing debt contracts to investors, and thus resembles commercial banks. In the other structure, called...

This paper empirically investigates banks' investment allocations over the recent business cycle. I identify unsolicited deposit shocks resulting from unconventional energy development and estimate bank allocations of these deposits. In the pre-recession period, banks lend 38 percent of...