This paper describes the transmission of the recent financial crisis to Japan and compares the monetary policy reactions by the Bank of Japan (BoJ) with those during the 1990s, and with reactions by other major central banks. The paper first reviews the recent literature on the origins and...

This report examines the problem of access to credit for low- and moderate- income households. It notes that this problem has two dimensions. On the one hand, there are millions of consumers without access to mainstream sources of consumer credit. On the other hand, many of these same consumers...

With the purpose of measuring and monitoring systemic risk, some topological properties of the interbank exposures and the payments system networks are studied. We propose non-topological measures which are useful to describe the individual behavior of banks in both networks. The evolution of...

This paper investigates contagion in the German interbank market under the assumption of a stochastic loss given default (LGD). We combine a unique data set about the LGD of interbank loans with detailed data about interbank exposures. We find that the frequency distribution of the LGD is...

The Banque de France organised a symposium on microfinance in July 2011. Based on the experience of Southern countries, the participants stressed the usefulness of microfinance as an instrument for financial inclusion, economic development and poverty reduction. They proposed several avenues for...

SMEs have a different bank financing structure from that of large companies and thus do not enjoy the same financing conditions. This article examines the main factors that explain the interest rates on loans to SMEs and highlights the impact of the 2008 financial crisis on credit pricing policies.

Recently, there have been several government initiatives pointing to the electronisation of the voucher market, some of which have already reached the phase of implementation. In the interests of implementation at the society level which is efficient from technical as well as ‘business’...

We estimate time series of option implied Probabilities of Default (PoDs) for 19 major US financial institutions from 2002 to 2012. These PoDs are estimated as mass points of entropy based risk neutral densities and subsequently corrected for maturity dependence. The ob- tained time series are...

Mortgage payment protection insurance (hereafter MPPI) provides varying combinations of accident, sickness and unemployment insurance and is used to protect the mortgage payments of policyholders in the event of a fall in income. Recently the provision of this service in the UK has been heavily...

Recently, several studies have argued about the interactions of the real economy and financial system, as well as the importance of financial cycles in business cycle fluctuations. To date, there exists near consensus among central bankers, economists, and other scholars that the financial cycle...