This paper is concerned with the allegation that fair value accounting rules have contributed significantly to the recent financial crisis. It focuses on one particular channel for that contribution: the impact of fair value on actual or potential failure of banks. The paper compares four...

The paper chronicles the evolution of financial regulation in Ireland, with particular attention given to the roles, responsibilities and actions of those authorities responsible for maintaining financial stability. It examines the role of financial regulation during the property bubble and...

The paper maps the risk management failures within Anglo Irish Bank, showing that, when banks are systemic in nature, poor internal corporate governance within a Minsky credit cycle can lead to destabilising macroeconomic conditions, which may prolong the effects of a credit-induced downturn....

The North Atlantic Financial Crisis of 2007 did suddenly and massively disrupt the activities of financial markets and financial institutions that were organised under a market-based financial architecture at local and international levels. Both corporate and public policies were at the origin...

A number of countries have gone through banking crises since the early 1970s. This work links those episodes with the patterns of various financial reforms within those countries. As banking crises are endogenous, crisis exposures to major trading partners help identify the causality between...

This paper shows, for the first time, how liquidity infusions from government bailouts affect loan modification in the mortgage market. The design of the Pooling and Service Agreement leads mortgage servicers to prefer foreclosure to modification when the servicers are liquidity constrained....

Does limiting the size of a large bank reduce its insolvency risk? This paper shows that the answer to this question depends on how exactly paring down of the bank size is done. In fact, the insolvency risk may go down or up depending on the composition of assets and liabilities of the bank...

“Too big to fail” traditionally refers to a bank that is perceived to generate unacceptable risk to the banking system and indirectly to the economy as a whole if it were to default and unable to fulfill its obligations. Such a bank generally has substantial liabilities to other banks...

This paper studies how financial intermediation varies across banks. Bank size is a first-order determinant of banks' capital structure in the cross-section. Largest banks have the lowest capital-to-asset ratio and the lowest ratio of Tier-1 capital against risk-weighted assets. These large...

This paper reviews the papers that were presented at a conference at Washington University in St. Louis, a subset of which were published in a special issue of The Journal of Financial Intermediation. The papers cover a wide range of issues on how banks and financial markets have evolved since...