The Norwegian experiences of the past thirty years illustrate what we believe are two general tendencies in bank regulation. The first one is that a bank crisis will tend to focus regulators' minds and lead to stricter regulations. The second one is that cycles in regulation tend to interact...

We estimate a multivariate early-warning model to assess the usefulness of private credit and other macro-financial variables in predicting banking sector vulnerabilities. Using data for 23 European countries, we find that global variables and in particular global credit growth are strong...

We integrate bank and bond financing into a two-sector neoclassical growth model to examine the stabilization effect of endogenous bank leverage adjustment. We show that although bank leverage amplifies shocks, the increase of leverage to a decline in bank equity is an automatic stabilizer in...

On 16th November 2009, SUERF, CEPS and the Belgian Financial Forum coorganized a conference "Crisis management at cross-roads" in Brussels. All papers in the present volume are based on contributions at the conference and the SUERF Annual Lecture which followed the event.

This paper provides an overview of the regulation and supervision of the Belgian financial system from the creation of Belgium in 1830 to the early 21st century. After severe crises, the National Bank of Belgium was created in 1850. The Great Depression led to further reforms, increasing the...