Ukraine was one of the countries hardest hit by the global economic and financial crisis; it was also one of the first countries supported by a Stand-By Arrangement (SBA). The Ex Post Evaluation of Exceptional Access Under the 2008 SBA reveals that the achievement of program objectives was...

This paper documents global trends in bank activity, consolidation, internationalization, and financial firm conglomeration, and explores the extent to which financial firm risk and systemic risk potential in banking are related to consolidation and conglomeration. We find that while there is a...

This paper reviews the nature of central bank involvement in 26 episodes of financial disturbance and crises in Latin America from the mid-1990s onwards. It finds that, except in a handful of cases, large amounts of central bank money were used to cope with large and small crises alike. Pouring...

This paper provides the first empirical analysis of the cross-country relationship between a direct measure of competitive conduct of financial institutions and banking system fragility. Using the Panzar and Rosse H-Statistic as a measure for competition in 38 countries during 1980-2003, we...

We identify different sources of risk as important determinants of banks' corporate structures when expanding into new markets. Subsidiary-based corporate structures benefit from greater protection against economic risk because of affiliate-level limited liability, but are more exposed to the...

This paper studies why currency and monetary shock hit Indonesia's economy and banking sector so severely and the measures that were taken to deal with the banking crisis, the lessons learned, and challenges faced in restructuring and strengthening the banking system. The vulnerable state of the...

This paper presents Detailed Assessment of the United States’s observance of Basel Core Principles for Effective Banking Supervision. The U.S. financial system is large and highly diversified. At the end-2007, total U.S. financial assets amounted to almost four and a half times the size...

Banks are highly leveraged institutions, potentially attracted to speculative lending even without deposit insurance. A counterbalancing incentive to lend prudently is the risk of loss of charter value, which depends on future rents. We show in a dynamic model that current concentration does not...

The global financial crisis has highlighted the importance of early identification of weak banks: when problems are identified late, solutions are much more costly. Until recently, Europe has seen only a small number of outright bank failures, which made the estimation of early warning models...