This study explores the effectiveness of the incentive mechanisms embedded within the UK’s Funding for Lending Scheme (FLS) for banks’ to expand their supply of lending to medium sized enterprises (SMEs). The FLS was announced by the Bank of England and HM Treasury in June 2012, with the aim...

Using data from OECD countries over the past three decades, this paper shows that financial expansion has fuelled greater income inequality. Higher levels of credit intermediation and stock markets are both related with a more unequal distribution of income. Greater income inequality may not...

The size and composition of assets and liabilities of households differ vastly across the income distribution in euro area countries. This paper shows that differences between income groups in household finance on both sides of the balance sheet contribute to income inequality. The distribution...

The high costs of crises underscore the need to strengthen the resilience of economies, notably by assessing early on potential vulnerabilities that can lead to such costly events. This paper first discusses the source and nature of potential vulnerabilities in OECD countries that can lead to...

The global financial crisis and the high associated costs have revived the academic and policy interest in “early warning indicators” of crises. This paper provides empirical evidence on the usefulness of a new set of vulnerability indicators, proposed in a companion paper (Röhn et al.,...

The global financial crisis highlighted the importance of strengthening the resilience of our economies to adverse shocks. In this paper, we take stock of studies carried out primarily within, but also outside the OECD, to better understand the role of macroeconomic and structural policies in...

In the run-up to the financial crisis, indebtedness of households and non-financial businesses rose to historically high levels in many OECD countries; gross debt of financial companies rose dramatically relative to GDP. Much of the debt accumulation appears to have been based on excessive...

In Norway house prices have risen to high levels, associated with very strong credit growth, in a context of low interest rates. Such a combination was in many countries a contributory factor to the 2008- 09 crisis. The Norwegian authorities have been well aware of the problem. Below-target...

The global financial crisis and its high economic and social costs have revived academic and policy interest in “early warning indicators” of crises. This paper aims to investigate the performance of vulnerability indicators as advance warning indicators of past severe GDP per capita...

This paper reviews the state of the banking sector in Europe. At the aggregate level, the empirical data suggest that the Baltics, Cyprus, Greece and Ireland, in particular, are hit by a strong decline in lending in the wake of the financial crisis. This deleveraging is mainly caused by a...