In this paper, using monetary policy rules, we build a model which describes the fixing of the interest rate by the Bank of Central African's States (BEAC). First, with a GMM adapted for a forward looking rule, we propose a reaction function for this central bank. The result shows that from 1986...

Over the past several years, substantial research effort has gone into measuring the efficiency of financial institutions. Many studies have found that inefficiencies are quite large, on the order of 20% or more of total banking industry costs and about half of the industry's potential profits....

We investigate the sources of recent changes in the performance of U.S. banks using concepts and techniques borrowed from the cross-section efficiency literature. Our most striking result is that during 1991-1997, cost productivity worsened while profit productivity improved substantially,...

We develop a simple model that looks at the incentives of private banks to behave prudentially and undertake costly efforts to lower the probability of bankruptcy or having to be bailed out by a lender of last resort. Government regulators can force banks to increase efforts beyond the privately...

This paper seeks to understand the interplay between banks, bank regulation, sovereign default risk and central bank guarantees in a monetary union. I assume that banks can use sovereign bonds for repurchase agreements with a common central bank, and that their sovereign partially backs up any...

The role of bank capital as a propagation channel of shocks is strongly pronounced in recent macroeconomic models. In this paper, we show how the evolution of bank capital depends on the share of non-state-contingent assets in banks’ balance sheets and present the consequences for...

This paper compares the consequences of equity injections into banks with purchases of corporate and government bonds in a financial crisis situation using a New Keynesian model in which non-financial firms predominantly take non-market-based debt from banks instead of issuing securities. Our...

This paper seeks to understand the interplay between banks, bank regulation, sovereign default risk and central bank guarantees in a monetary union. I assume that banks can use sovereign bonds for repurchase agreements with a common central bank, and that their sovereign partially backs up any...

This paper studies how financial intermediation varies across banks. Bank size is a first-order determinant of banks' capital structure in the cross-section. Largest banks have the lowest capital-to-asset ratio and the lowest ratio of Tier-1 capital against risk-weighted assets. These large...