Islamic banking has crossed the milestone of forty years since the Dubai Islamic Bank and the Islamic Development Bank were established in 1975. Islamic banking windows, standalone Islamic banking systems and even full-fledged Islamic banks, are operating as a part of global finance industry in...

Global risk-off shocks can be highly destabilising for financial markets and, absent an adequate policy response, may trigger severe recessions. In Caballero and Kamber (2019), we document that the unconventional policies adopted by the main central banks were effective in containing asset price...

We leverage a ‘catch-all' measure of financial innovation – research and development spending in the financial sector – to assess the net relationship between financial innovation and economic growth and evaluate the influence of macroprudential policy on this relationship. Using a panel...

This paper studies the impact of credit rating agency (CRA) downgrade announcements on the value of the Euro and the yields of French, Italian, German and Spanish long-term sovereign bonds during the culmination of the Eurozone debt crisis in 2011-2012. The employed GARCH models show that CRA...

Political economy theory expects politicians to use budget deficits to engineer an election-timed boom, known as the political business cycle. We challenge and contextualize this view by incorporating the financial constraints faced by governments into an electoral framework. We argue that the...

A survey of the empirical literature on early warning indicators of banking crises is presented. Descriptive analyses have been published for decades, but cross-national panel data analyses have only been performed since the late 1990s. More recently, the severity of the subprime-Lehman crisis...

We study the impact of debtor distress during a financial crisis on support for a populist far-right party. Our empirical approach exploits variation in exposure to foreign currency household loans during a currency crisis in Hungary. Foreign currency debt exposure leads to a large and...

Wealthier economies experience less frequent but more severe financial crises. To investigate this puzzle, we propose a model of collateralized lending in which: (1) borrowers endogenously determine collateral quality, and (2) lenders can produce costly information about collateral. In...

It is commonly argued that crises open up a window of opportunity to implement policies that otherwise would not have the necessary political backing. The argument goes that the political cost of deep reforms declines as crises unravel structural problems that need to be urgently rectified and...