Insufficient capital buffers of banks have been identified as one main cause for the large systemic effects of the recent financial crisis. Although higher capital is no panacea, it yet features prominently in proposals for regulatory reform. But how do increased capital requirements affect...

Insufficient capital buffers of banks have been identified as one main cause for the large systemic effects of the recent financial crisis. Although higher capital is no panacea, it yet features prominently in proposals for regulatory reform. But how do increased capital requirements affect...

The growth and deepening of financial markets entailed the expectation that the bank lending channel of monetary policy transmission would lose its importance. The paper explains why, on the contrary, the banking sector has become a major locus of origination and amplification of macro-financial...

This paper investigates the factors affecting the access of rural households to formal credit in the Mekong Delta (MD), Vietnam. Poverty levels in the Mekong Delta have reduced significantly over the last decades, but in the rural areas they remain significant. If it is assumed that access to...

Evidence abounds on the propagation of financial stresses originating in the US mortgage market to banking systems worldwide through international funding markets. But the transmission of this external funding shock to the real economy via bank lending is surprisingly under-examined, given the...

This paper investigates the impact of the new capital requirements introduced under the Basel III framework on bank lending rates and loan growth. Higher capital requirements, by raising banks' marginal cost of funding, lead to higher lending rates. The data presented in the paper suggest that...

In this paper I compare a traditional demand oriented model of bank lending with its focus on short-term interest rates in the money market, to a non-traditional capital budgeting model of bank lending based on movements in share valuations for the Euro area. Using non-nested hypothesis tests,...

In this paper I compare a capital budgeting model of of bank lending based on stock valuations to a supply/demand model based on an interest rate channel for France and Germany using non-nested hypothesis tests and omitted variables tests. For France both tests indicate a strong rejection of the...

Despite the swift rise of shadow banking in China over the last decade, the challenge it poses to the monetary policy effectiveness is understudied. Using a novel dataset of listed Chinese banks, we find that aggressive issuance of off-balance sheet WMP impedes an efficient transmission of...

There is little question that financial factors played a role in the amplification and extension of shocks during the Great Depression. The specific mechanisms through which financial factors affected real economic activity, as well as their timing and extent, nevertheless remain a source of...