Microcredit and microfinance emerged in the 1970’s in Bangladesh and other developing countries and expanded rapidly worldwide as a business model financially sustainable and able to fight poverty and social exclusion. Empirical evidence confirms microcredit ability to mitigate poverty but its...

The 2008 financial crisis is the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of 1929. It has been characterised by a housing bubble in a context of rapid credit expansion, high risk-taking and exacerbated financial leverage, ending into deleveraging and credit crunch when the bubble burst....

Studies of the Bank of England’s quantitative easing (QE) policy have tended to focus on its impact on financial markets and the broader macroeconomy. Less attention has been given to the effect on banks’ balance sheets and bank lending. In this paper we use a new non-publicly available...

This paper contributes to the empirical literature on Islamic finance by investigating the feature of Islamic and conventional banks in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries over the period 2003-2010. We use parametric and non-parametric classification models (Linear discriminant analysis,...

We analyze whether mid-level managers in securitized finance were aware of a large-scale housing bubble and a looming crisis in 2004-2006 using their personal home transaction data. We find that the average person in our sample neither timed the market nor were cautious in their home...

We investigate whether homeowners respond strategically to news of mortgage modification programs. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in modification policy induced by settlement of U.S. state government lawsuits against Countrywide Financial Corporation, which agreed to offer...

The paper discusses the prospects for European Banking Union as they appear in the summer of 2014. The first part gives an overview over the problems that gave rise to the Banking Union initiative, the second part discusses the legislative measures that have been taken towards this objective....

This study estimates global economies of scale at both the plant and firm level for five categories of Peruvian microfinance institutions (MFIs) using monthly panel data for the period 2003-2010. It also assesses possible determinants of economies of scale at the firm level for each category of...

This paper introduces banks into a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model by featuring asymmetric information as the underlying friction for banking. Asymmetric information about asset qualities causes a lemons problem in the asset market. In this environment, banks can issue liquid...

Recently, some notable contributions suggest that discretionary fiscal policy can be an effective and self-financing policy option in the presence of extreme macroeconomic conditions. Given the special relationship between the Irish sovereign and its main financial institutions, this paper...