This paper studies how capital market imperfections affect the welfare effects of forming a currency union. The analysis considers a bank-only world where intermediaries compete in Cournot fashion and monitoring and state verification are costly. The first part determines the credit market...

The authors examine the effect of volatility on the costs and benefits of financial market integration. The authors use a basic framework that combines the costly state verification model and the contract enforceability approach. They assess the welfare effects of financial market integration by...

The authors analyze the implications for crisis management of inefficient financial intermediation in a country (such as Indonesia or the Republic of Korea) where firms are highly indebted. They base their analysis on a model in which firms rely on bank credit to finance their working capital...

The authors examine the extent to which permanent terms-of-trade shocks have an asymmetric effect on private savings. Using a simple three-period model, they show that if households expect to face binding constraints on borrowing in bad states of nature (when the economy is in a long trough...

The authors propose a two-step approach for assessing the extent to which the fall in credit in crisis-stricken East Asian countries was a supply- or demand-induced phenomenon. The first step involves estimating a demand function for excess liquid assets held by commercial banks. The second step...

The authors analyze the implications of inefficient financial intermediation for dbt management, using a model in which firms rely on bank credit to finance their working capital needs, and, lenders face a high state verification and enforcement costs of loan contracts. Their analysis shows that...

The authors study how contagion affects bank lending spreads and fluctuations in output in Argentina. They analyze what determines bank lending spreads when verification and enforcement costs for loan contracts are high. They present estimates of a vector auto-regression model that relates bank...