We examine the evolution of the Icelandic banking sector in its macroeconomic environment. The story culminates in the crisis of October 2008, when all three major banks in Iceland collapsed in three successive days. The country is still struggling to cope with the consequences. The paper...

We review heterogeneous agent-based models of financial stability and their application in stress tests. In contrast to the mainstream approach, which relies heavily on the rational expectations assumption and focuses on situations where it is possible to compute an equilibrium, this approach...

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...

This paper examines how structural policies can influence a country's risk of suffering financial turmoil. Using a panel of 184 developed and emerging economies from 1970 to 2009, the empirical analysis examines which structural policies can affect financial stability by either shaping the...

This paper proposes a quantitative theory of the interaction between private and public debt in an open economy. Excessive private debt increases the frequency of financial crises. During such crises the government provides fiscal bailouts financed with risky public debt. This response may cause...

This paper assesses several early warning (EWS) models of financial crises to propose a model that can predict the incidence of a currency crisis in developing countries. For this purpose, we employ the equal weighting (EW) and dynamic model averaging (DMA) approaches to combine forecast from...

Asia's economy, Thailand in particular, was booming when the financial crises hit in the 1990s. However, troubles were brewing underneath the seemingly buoyant economy. With a fragile financial system and ineffective domestic government responses to these troubles, an exchange rate crisis took...

This paper empirically examines the impact of capital flows on credit growth, credit excesses and banking crises using quarterly panel data from 43 advanced (AEs) and emerging market economies (EMEs). Regressions show that gross capital inflows precede credit growth and credit excesses. Both...

This study assesses contagion from the USA subprime financial crisis on a large set of frontier stock markets. Copula models were used to investigate the structure of dependence between frontier markets and the USA, before and after the occurrence of the crisis. Statistically significant...

In the months preceding the failure of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, banks were willing to pay a premium over the Federal Reserve's discount window (DW) rate to participate in the much less flexible Term Auction Facility (TAF). We empirically test the predictions of a new signalling model...