This paper examines the behavior of bank soundness indicators during episodes of brisk loan growth, using bank-level data for central and eastern Europe and controlling for the feedback effect of credit growth on bank soundness. No evidence is found that rapid loan expansion has weakened banks...

A perennial question in international finance is to what extent stock returns are influenced by country-location, as opposed to industry-affiliation, factors. This paper develops a novel methodology to measure these effects, in which portfolios mimicking "pure" country and industry factors are...

This paper attempts to predict the incidence of arrears to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) by modifying and applying two of the major early warning systems for currency crises: the "signals" approach proposed by Kaminsky, Lizondo, and Reinhart (1997) and the probit-based alternative...

A stochastic volatility model where volatility was driven solely by a latent variable called news was estimated for three stock indices. A Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm was used for estimating Bayesian parameters and filtering volatilities. Volatility persistence being close to one was...

This paper documents the phenomenon of underpricing initial public offerings (IPOs) for 47 firms that went public between 2001 and 2006 in the equity markets of the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. The average initial abnormal returns of 290 percent exceed those found in the...

This paper examines the role of credit markets in the transmission of U.S. macro-financial shocks through the prism of a financial conditions index (FCI) based on a vector autoregression (VAR) methodology. It explores the relative predictive power of market variables compared to credit...

This paper derives risk indicators for the major Chilean banks based on contingent claims analysis, an extension of Black-Scholes-Merton option-pricing theory. These risk indicators are clearly tied to macroeconomic and financial developments in Chile and outside, but bank responses are highly...

We estimate a latent factor model that decomposes international stock returns into global, country-, and industry-specific shocks and allows for stock-specific exposures to these shocks. We find that across stocks there is substantial dispersion in these exposures, which is partly explained by...

The paper relies on a firm-level data on transition economies to examine the relationship between informality and bank credit. We find evidence that informality is robustly and significantly associated with lower access to and use of bank credit. We also find that higher tax compliance costs...