A widespread consensus for an easier access to bank credit for SMEs to quicken the recovery could lead to overlook risks, for banks as well as for economies, of financing projects that do not fit the structural adjustments in the world economy caused by the international crisis. Sustainable...

This study brings out policy lessons for China today, a financially repressed country, from the financial liberalization process in Denmakr, Finland, Norway and Sweden in the 1980s and early 1990s. This report identifies a set of policy lessons for China today from the experience of financial...

Systemic risk is the risk of a collapse of the entire financial system, typically triggered by the default of one, or more, interconnected financial institutions. In this paper we estimate the systemic risk contribution of Italian listed banks for the period 2000-2011. We follow a methodology...

We examine the effects of government liquidity infusion on the risk taking behavior of Canadian banks and find that banks that received government financial assistance subsequently experienced a decrease in risk. The reduction in risk is induced by a shift from non-interest income related...

This paper discusses the concept of leverage, its components and how to measure and monitor it. It proposes an innovative approach to assessing leverage based on flows using the concept of a marginal leverage ratio, which reveals the leverage related to new activities, as a valuable supplement...

I test theories of the recent financial crisis by studying how banks' pre-crisis investments connect to their CEOs' beliefs. Using different proxies for beliefs, I find banks with larger housing investments and worse crisis performance had CEOs who were more optimistic ex ante. Banks with the...

We study the transmission of bank distress to nonfinancial firms from 34 countries during the 2007-2009 financial crisis using systemic and bank-specific shocks. We find that bank distress is associated with equity valuation losses and investment cuts to borrower firms with the strongest lending...

This paper investigates whether banks were able to create value for their shareholders after the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and whether operational efficiency is related to shareholder value creation in informationally efficient stock markets. The impact of GFC on bank efficiency and...

We find that the level of bank herding in real estate loans during boom period is substantially higher than the level of bank herding in commercial and industrial loans or consumer loans. More importantly, we find that bank herding significantly increases systemic risk. In particular, herding in...