This Technical Note examines the financial situation of Italian households and nonfinancial corporations and risks to the banking system. The credit risk from Italian households is mitigated by their considerable net wealth. Income has declined during the crisis, leading to tighter financial...

In recent years, the IMF has released a growing number of reports and other documents covering economic and financial developments and trends in member countries. Each report, prepared by a staff team after discussions with government officials, is published at the option of the member country.

The Article IV Consultation discusses the IMF Executive Board’s assessment of economic developments and policies in Switzerland. With the exchange rate floor in place for more than one year, the Swiss economy has been relatively stable. Although overall export growth is weak, the external...

Using a sample of 291 banks from 35 OIC (Organization of Islamic Cooperation) member Muslim countries with 2078 bank year observations from 2003 to 2010, we analyze if bank earning management in terms of Loan Loss Provisioning (LLP hereafter) is affected by the banking nature whether Islamic or...

We study the effects of a bank’s engagement in trading. Traditional banking is relationship-based: not scalable, long-term oriented, with high implicit capital, and low risk (thanks to the law of large numbers). Trading is transactions-based: scalable, short-term, capital constrained, and with...

This paper uses loan-level data from the residential mortgage books of four Irish credit institutions, as at December 2010. The focus of the paper, is to provide an overview of the structure and condition of these housing loan books. This includes a description of borrower categories, interest...

We show that the lightly regulated non-bank mortgage originators contributed disproportionately to the recent boom-bust housing cycle. Using comprehensive data on mortgage originations, which we aggregate at the county level, we first establish that the market share of these independent non-bank...

This paper empirically explores the impact of bank size, holding company affiliation and the degree of branching on small business and farm lending through a conceptual analysis encompassing private information asymmetries inherent in these bank dependent borrowers. The study expands the...

The microfinance sector is an example of a sector in which firms with different business models coexist. Next to pure for-profit microfinance institutions MFIs, the sector has room for non-profit organizations, and includes social for-profit firms that aim to maximize a double bot- tom line and...

Most corporate loans are priced at rounded spreads, e.g. spreads that are a multiple of 25 basis points. Using a sample of 16,598 loan tranches signed by US borrowers between January 1988 and December 2010, this study explores the determinants of such interest rate clustering in the corporate...