In the East Asian crisis, connections - with industrial groups or influential families - increased the probability of distress for financial institutions. Connections also made closure more, not less, likely, suggesting that the closure processes themselves were transparent. But larger...

We claim that we currently live in a banking regulatory bubble. We review how: i) banking intermediation theory hinges on dealing with borrower-lender asymmetry of information; ii) instead, the presence of complete information is the keystone of the finance theory. Next, we document how finance...

We provide a cross-country and cross-bank analysis of the financial determinants of the Great Financial Crisis using data on 83 countries from the period 1998 to 2006. First, our cross-country results show that the probability of suffering the crisis in 2008 was larger for countries having...