We explore how a relatively small amount of heterogeneous securities created turmoil in financial markets in much of the world in 2007 and 2008. The drivers of the financial turmoil and the financial crisis of 2008 were heterogeneous securities that were hard to value. These securities created...

Stress testing has recently become a critical risk management and capital planning tool for large financial institutions and their supervisors around the world. However, the one prior U.S. experience tying stress test results to capital requirements was a spectacular failure: the Office of...

Investment in infrastructure for increasing trade and connectivity in South Asia and Southeast Asia has been impacted by a reduction in commercial bank participation in project financing, which has significantly increased the role of multilateral financial institutions and export credit...

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are the backbone of most Asian economies. The main obstacle to the development of the SME sector is the lack of stable finance. Considering the bank-dominated characteristic of economies in Asia, banks are the main source of financing, and the lack of a...

This paper tries to explain different nature of the dynamics during the upward and downward part of the last house price cycle in Spain. Covered bonds are introduced as an instrument which may accelerate a house price boom, while it may also serve as a source of correction to overvalued house...

We build a model of a financial intermediary, in the tradition of Diamond and Dybvig (1983), and show that allowing the intermediary to impose redemption fees or gates in a crisis - a form of suspension of convertibility - can lead to preemptive runs. In our model, a fraction of investors...

We review recent changes in monetary policy that have led to development and testing of an overnight reverse repurchase agreement (ON RRP) facility, an innovative tool for implementing monetary policy during the normalization process. Making ON RRPs available to a broad set of investors,...

Besides the introduction and the final conclusions, this Discussion Paper has four sections. The first presents the "state of art", that is, the current debate about the long-term financing of the neo-corporatist state capitalism in Brazil. Then it shows the personal and corporate wealth as...

This study investigates the legitimacy of the relatively high interest rates charged by those microfinance institutions (MFIs) which have been transformed into regulated commercial banks using information garnered from a panel of 1232 MFIs from 107 developing countries. Results show that...

I revisit the Diamond-Dybvig model of liquidity insurance in the presence of hidden trades. The key result is that in this environment deposit-taking banks are not necessary for the efficient provision of liquidity. Mutual funds are constrained efficient when supplemented with the same...