This survey reviews the literature on the political economy of financial structure, broadly defined to include the size of capital markets and banking systems as well as the distribution of access to external finance across firms.The theoretical literature on the institutional basis for...

This paper assesses how the financial system influences the strength of the liquidity effect in a calibrated limited participation model of the monetary transmission mechanism. The model suggests that bankbased systems should be characterized by smaller liquidity effects since monetary...

This paper provides an overview of conceptual issues and recent research findings concerning the structure and the role of financial systems and an introduction into the new research area of comparative financial systems. The authors start by pointing out the importance of financial systems in...

Tracking and monitoring stress within the financial system is a key component of macroprudential policy. This paper introduces a new measure of contemporaneous stress: the Factor based Index of Systemic Stress (FISS). The aim of the index is to capture the common components of data describing...