Fraud and irrationality are often blamed for financial manias and panics. Investor euphoria can unleash social and technological breakthroughs, but the subsequent failures can destroy value and radicalize the political sphere. Are these events random, idiosyncratic, or driven by some force? The...

The removal of geographic restrictions on banking activities can provide credit to a larger population. Economic hardships, however, can force some of the borrowers to default on their loans and file for bankruptcy to overcome financial distress. Using data aggregated at the US county-level, we...

In addition to their direct effects, episodes of financial instability may decrease investor confidence. Measuring the impact of a crisis on investor confidence is complicated by the fact that it is difficult to disentangle the effect of investor confidence from coincident direct effects of the...

The paper analyses problems arising from the interdependence of liquidity provision in the financial system. Findings document, that liquidity shortage of minor financial players can translate into liquidity shortage for systemic relevant players, thereby putting the proper functioning of the...

We estimate time series of option implied Probabilities of Default (PoDs) for 19 major US financial institutions from 2002 to 2012. These PoDs are estimated as mass points of entropy based risk neutral densities and subsequently corrected for maturity dependence. The ob- tained time series are...

Currently, private trust in commercial banks declines as a consequence of today´s financial crisis. As past crises, e.g. the Asian crisis, show, the loss of confidence in the financial sector typically causes private agents to withdraw their capital from financial institutions. Thus, the...

When the current financial crisis has widened to a global economic crisis an urgent call for implementing financial markets and financial institutions in business cycle models emerged. By modelling commercial banks as a third type of economic agent, we are able to implement the feature of early...

This paper presents an in-depth analysis of developments in the microfinance sector before and after the Lehman Brothers collapse in 2008 by comparing them with developments in traditional banking sectors of emerging market economies and developing countries. The findings indicate that...

We estimate the impulse response function (IRF) of GDP toa banking crisis, applying an extension of the local projectionsmethod developed in Jorda (2005). This method is shown to bemore robust to misspecification than calculating IRFs analytically. However, it suffers from a hitherto unnoticed...

The key dynamics of the transatlantic banking crisis are analyzed - with emphasis on the fact that the banking disaster of 2007/08 was not really a surprise -, and the five key requirements for restoring stability and efficiency in the EU/OECD banking sector are highlighted. Most important,...