This special feature studies the risks posed by the rapid rise in property developer debt in several Asian economies in recent years. Gradually, the firms involved are shifting away from traditional bank loans and choosing to issue debt securities, often in foreign currency. So far indebtedness...

We use trades by US corporate insiders to investigate bank opacity, both in absolute terms and relative to other firms. On average, bank insider sales do not earn an abnormal return and do not predict stock returns. By contrast, bank insider purchases do, even though less than other firms. Our...

We use questionnaire responses as well as new data sets to assess the deployment and effectiveness of macroprudential instruments for a sample of emerging market economies. First, we highlight the challenges that authorities face in the measurement of financial stability and systemic risk, the...

Emerging market central banks have a long history of using macroprudential instruments. In the aftermath of the Asian crisis, central banks in the region deployed macroprudential tools first to deal with the fallout of crisis and then to prevent vulnerabilities from building up again. Similarly,...

The paper analyses the information content of trades in Bund futures and German government bonds before and during the 1998 financial market turbulences and tests whether the contributions to price discovery of the two market segments were constant over time. The results suggest that, under the...

We find that declining bank credit to the private sector will not necessarily constrain the economic recovery after output has bottomed out following a financial crisis. To obtain this result, we examine data from 39 financial crises, which -- as the current one -- were preceded by credit booms....