This paper tests for the presence of a credit channel (particularly a bank-lending sub-channel) for monetary policy in the housing market. We argue that the importance of this channel for investment in residential housing is highly dependent on the structural features, and particularly the...

The rating-sensitive capital charges on credit risks under the new Basel Accord are likely to increase the volatility of minimum capital requirements, which may force banks to hold larger capital cushions in excess of minimum requirements. We analyse this claim on the basis of numerical...

Transparency regulation aims at reducing financial fragility by strengthening market discipline. There are however two elementary properties of banking that may render such regulation detrimental. First, an extensive financial safety net may eliminate the disciplinary effect of transparency...

The purpose of this paper is to assess whether the widely-held markup theory of interest rate determination, first put forth by Rousseas in the mid-1980s, is sufficiently robust empirically or whether one aspect of Keynesian liquidity preference theory, that which emphasizes the role of banks's...

On peut identifier un modele anglo-saxon de financement, ou le salaries consommateurs detiennent directement les actions des entreprise, et le modele europeen (continental) , ou ils detiennent des actifs bancaires (sans risque) et ou les entreprises sont financees par le credit. Dans le premier...

Creditors are often passive because they are reluctant to show bad debts on their own balance sheets. We propose a simple general equilibrium model to study the externality effect of creditor passivity. The model yields rich insights into the phenomenon of creditor passivity, both in transition...

Conventional wisdom holds that overlending problems and banking crises in open economies are provoked by investor moral hazard, which is caused in turn by guarantees on deposits. This Paper shows that this is not necessarily the case: guarantees on deposits may even limit the losses banks...

Confirmation bias refers to cognitive errors that bias one towards one's own prior beliefs. A vast empirical literature documents its existence and psychologists identify it as one of the most problematic aspects of human reasoning. In this paper, we present three related scenarios where...

How do banks react to increased competition? Recent banking theory offers conflicting predictions about the impact of competition on bank orientation - i.e., the choice of relationship based versus transactional banking - and bank industry specialization. We empirically investigate the impact of...

Available studies on asymmetries in the monetary transmission mechanism within Europe are invariably based on macro-economic evidence: such evidence is abundant but often contradictory. This paper takes a different route by using micro-economic data. We use the information contained in the...