As the financial crisis gathered momentum in 2007, the United States Federal Reserve brought its policy interest rate aggressively down from 5 1/4 percent in September 2007 to virtually zero by December 2008. In contrast, although facing the same economic and financial stress, the European...

We study the vulnerability of 130 banks directly supervised by the European Central Bank's Single Supervisory Mechanism. Illustrative stress tests using banks' balance sheet data reveal that significant stress prevails in the euro area's smaller and medium-sized banks, many of them located in...

The relevance of political risk to international trade and investment remains a topic of continuing interest. However, summary measures of political risk, including country corruption, do not give consistent results. In this paper, we bring together two recent streams of literature to highlight...