This paper is the first to analyze the credit risk of a microfinance institution based on the loan portfolio of a leading Maghrebian microfinance institution, both in terms of number of clients served and of portfolio size. This allows us to work with a proprietary data set of 1,144,770...

The paper attempts to investigate the influence of the 1988 Basel Accord on bank behavior and monetary policy. It is argued that the Accord was successful in that it forced commercial banks in all of G-10 countries to maintain higher capital ratios. Tentative research suggests, however, that –...

Bank failure is the result of a defective management in banking leading the bank to a stage of bankruptcy, which means that the insolvent bank is going to be closed by the banking authority. In general, the banking sector is viewed as more vulnerable to contagion than other industries since...

Although beneficial allocational effects have been a central motivator for the Basel II capital adequacy reform, the interaction of these effects with Basel II’s procyclical impact has been less discussed. In this paper, we investigate the effect of capital requirements on the allocation of...

Financial regulation today is largely framed by traditional business categories. The financial markets, however, have begun to bypass those categories, principally over the last thirty years. Chief among the changes has been convergence in the products and services offered by traditional...

Due to the severity of the financial market crisis most central banks reached the limits of their traditional monetary policy instruments and relied to a very large extent on instruments of unconventional monetary policy. In our paper we develop a simple theoretical framework for the money...

The recent crisis has led to a thriving academic and policy debate on the future regulation of financial institutions and markets. This paper argues that the objective of securing financial stability should be balanced with the goal of fostering financial deepening and efficiency, especially in...

Banking regulation has proven to be inadequate to guard systemic stability in the recent financial crisis. Central banks have provided liquidity and ministries of finance have set up rescue programmes to restore confidence and stability. Using a model of a systemic bank suffering from liquidity...

This paper studies whether compliance with the Basel Core Principles for effective banking supervision (BCPs) is associated with bank soundness. Using data for over 3,000 banks in 86countries, we find that neither the overall index of BCP compliance nor its individual components are robustly...

This paper examines procyclicality of the financial system. The introduction describes the natural and regulatory sources of procyclicality, focusing on the potential procyclical effect of the current Basel II regulatory framework for banks. It also mentions the regulatory tools for mitigating...