Since the second half of the 1990s, three major financial crises occurred, each with a significant involvement of rating agencies (RAs). Their rather poor performance palpably shows that they did not live up to their promises. RAs have proven to be fallible and overburdened. Given the task to...

Bank regulation might have contributed to or even reinforced adverse systemic shocks that materialised during the financial crisis. Capital regulation based on risk-weighted assets encourages innovation designed to circumvent regulatory requirements and shifts banks’ focus away from their core...

This paper discusses the role of state intervention for prevention, containment, and resolution of financial crises based mainly on the Korean experience during the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Crises in emerging market and developing economies tend to be more complicated than those faced by...

This paper argues that the subprime financial crisis reflects weakness in the real economy of the US from its start. Our comparison with prior US recessions indicates that the epicenters of most of the recessions were in the financial sector and that recessionary pressure was present in the last...

This report identifies a set of policy lessons for China today drawn from the experience of financial deregulation, financial crisis, and recovery in Scandinavia during the period 1985–2000. Although there are considerable differences between the huge Chinese economy and the small Nordic...

This paper presents evidence that reductions in mortgage interest rates associated with prepayment penalties are greater for riskier borrowers, as measured by mortgage type, credit scores, and local incomes and education levels. This is consistent with an efficiency view that, by reducing the...

This paper develops a theoretical framework to shed light on variation in credit rating standards over time and across asset classes. Ratings issued by credit rating agencies serve a dual role: they provide information to investors and are used to regulate institutional investors. We show that...

The homogenisation of finance that has dramatically increased the proclivity to instability and crisis is directly related to the very structure of regulations that have discouraged different types of institutions from emerging and/or and surviving. In developing countries they have the further...

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...

The Japanese government's response to the financial crisis in the 1990s was late, unprepared and insufficient; it failed to recognize the severity of the crisis, which developed slowly; faced no major domestic or external constraints; and lacked an adequate legal framework for bank resolution....