This paper provides a unified analysis for the onset of the 1998 financial crisis and the strong economic recovery afterward in Russia and other former Soviet Union countries. Before the crisis a banking failure arose owing to the coexistence of a lemons credit market and high government...

We model the asset-opacity choice of an intermediary subject to rollover risk in wholesale funding markets. Greater opacity means investors form more dispersed beliefs about an intermediary’s profitability. The endogenous benefit of opacity is lower fragility when profitability is expected to...

This paper analyzes the Asian crisis in the context of past and present financial crises to provide a model of asset price bubbles and ensuing crisis in developing and other economies. It is argued that financial structure matters for economic growth but is not that important for preventing...