Germany's bank-based financial system provides a high level of financial inclusion, measured by bank outreach and use of financial services. However, the most vulnerable individuals and small enterprises in Germany tend to be excluded or credit constrained. The quality of financial inclusion is...

The eurozone sovereign debt crisis, characterized by enormous debt burdens faced by its weakest economies, has also induced a parallel credit crunch and illiquidity concerns for European banks. Bank holdings of sovereign debt issued by peripheral eurozone countries have dropped in value and are...

Financial exclusion concerns 2.5 billion individuals and more than 450 million enterprises. The G20 countries are committed to the reduction of this phenomenon. The Bank of Italy has a fundamental role in the field of financial inclusion, both on a national and an international scale through...

Is there any need to “clean” up a banking system in the midst of a crisis, by closing or recapitalizing weak banks and taking bad assets off bank balance sheets, or can one wait till the crisis is over? We argue that an “overhang” of impaired banks that may be forced to sell assets soon...

State led credit and savings programs have been implemented in nu-merous low income countries, but their success in reaching the poorremains widely debated. We report on research which exploits the pol-icy features of the Indian social banking program to provide evidenceon this issue. State-led...

This paper identifies two types of market failures. The first concerns a coordination problem associated with panics. The problem in analysing this type of market failure from a policy perspective is that there is no widely accepted method for selecting equilibria. The second market failure...

Der vorliegende Beitrag beschäftigt sich mit der Aufarbeitung der Hintergründe der Subprime-Krisesowie der nachfolgenden internationalen Banken- und Finanzkrisen. Auf dieser Basis werden Vorschlägediskutiert, wie die erkannten Schwachstellen im Finanzsystem repariert bzw. behoben...

Vorliegende Arbeit sucht die Ursachen des Wandels der traditionellen Geschäftsstrategie vonKreditinstituten zu einem aktiven Steuerungsansatz unter dem Gesichtspunkt des Einflussesaufsichtsrechtlicher Anforderungen genauer zu analysieren. Es wird gezeigt, dass nicht nurökonomische Faktoren,...

This paper first provides a simple but very general framework for credit portfolio modellingwhich is based on the distinction between systematic and unsystematic risk. Unsystematicor borrower-specific risk vanishes through diversification in a very large, infinitelyfine-grained portfolio. The...

The transformation of private savers’ funds into business loans – the very essential function ofbanking intermediation - is weak in Belarus compared to other Eastern European economies.High concentration, governmental interference, an inconsistent regulation and a difficultbusiness environment...