The recent global financial crisis has intensified calls to make the financial sector less crisis-prone, and to this end to make impairment recognition rules for debt instruments more forward looking. To better understand the behavior of different impairment rules and their potential effect on...

A number of papers have shown that rapid growth in private sector credit is a strong predictor of a banking crisis. This paper will ask if credit growth is itself the cause of a crisis, or is it the combination of credit growth and external deficits? This paper estimates a probabilistic model to...

The economic crisis that began in 2007 and still lingers has invited comparison with the Great Depression of the 1930s. It has also generated renewed interest in Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz's explanation of the latter as mainly the consequence of the Fed's failure as a lender of last...

This study investigates whether fair value accounting contributes to the procyclicality of bank lending. Using banks' approval/denial decisions on residential mortgage applications to capture banks' supply of credit, I find no evidence that fair value accounting has procyclical effects on bank...

Our analytical description of how banks' responses to asset price changes can result in procyclical leverage reveals that for banks with a binding regulatory leverage constraint, absent differences in regulatory risk weights across assets, procyclical leverage does not occur. For banks without a...

The recent financial crises pointed out the central role of public and private debt in modern economies. However, even if debt is a recurring topic in discussions about the current economic situation, economic modelling does not take into account debt as one of the crucial determinants of...

The recent financial crises pointed out the central role of public and private debt in modern economies. However, even if debt is a recurring topic in discussions about the current economic situation, economic modeling does not take into account debt as one of the crucial determinants of...