Real-time gross settlement (RTGS) systems often incorporate features designed to economise on liquidity. Such 'hybrid features' have the potential to mitigate the systemic impact of operational disruptions of participants. This paper simulates operational disruptions of participants, using data...

In this paper we empirically analyse the factors which determined consumer credit in Greece in the period before and after the financial liberalisation, while accounting for significant changes in structure due to the lifting of credit restrictions and the subsequent impressive boom of consumer...

This paper has a twofold interest. First, we construct new concentration measures that alleviate some shortcomings of the most frequently applied indexes, which are Herfindahl-Hirshman and Entropy measures. They also provide additional information about the way in which the loan portfolio is...

This paper describes the transmission of the recent financial crisis to Japan and compares the monetary policy reactions by the Bank of Japan (BoJ) with those during the 1990s, and with reactions by other major central banks. The paper first reviews the recent literature on the origins and...

This report examines the problem of access to credit for low- and moderate- income households. It notes that this problem has two dimensions. On the one hand, there are millions of consumers without access to mainstream sources of consumer credit. On the other hand, many of these same consumers...

With the purpose of measuring and monitoring systemic risk, some topological properties of the interbank exposures and the payments system networks are studied. We propose non-topological measures which are useful to describe the individual behavior of banks in both networks. The evolution of...

This paper investigates contagion in the German interbank market under the assumption of a stochastic loss given default (LGD). We combine a unique data set about the LGD of interbank loans with detailed data about interbank exposures. We find that the frequency distribution of the LGD is...

The Banque de France organised a symposium on microfinance in July 2011. Based on the experience of Southern countries, the participants stressed the usefulness of microfinance as an instrument for financial inclusion, economic development and poverty reduction. They proposed several avenues for...

SMEs have a different bank financing structure from that of large companies and thus do not enjoy the same financing conditions. This article examines the main factors that explain the interest rates on loans to SMEs and highlights the impact of the 2008 financial crisis on credit pricing policies.

Recently, there have been several government initiatives pointing to the electronisation of the voucher market, some of which have already reached the phase of implementation. In the interests of implementation at the society level which is efficient from technical as well as ‘business’...