The government support of financial firms through direct assistance and programs to improve market liquidity during the worldwide financial crisis of 2007-2008 is unprecedented since the Great Depression. Whether a given firm is ex-ante ‘Too Big To Fail' in the mind of government agents is not...

This paper studies the effects of company risk and guaranty funds on life insurance in force using company-by-state level data during the 1985-2010 period. Our primary objective is to use the variation in the timing of guaranty fund adoptions across states to identify the impact of public...

This paper confirms that adopting explicit deposit insurance expanded risk-shifting incentives for Canadian Banks and Trust Companies. By transferring responsibility for monitoring non-systematic risk to the Canadian Deposit Insurance Corporation (CDIC), deposit insurance eliminated the...

We identify the effect of public guarantees on market discipline by exploiting the rich variation in U.S. state guarantees of property-liability insurer obligations. We find that insurer financing is significantly more risk-sensitive in the absence of government guarantees. The effects are...

The basic aspects of German and Ukrainian insurance markets development are addressed in this paper. Also, their interrelationships are considered based on the forecasting of most relevant descriptions of insurance activity given the time lag. To this end, correlative-regressive analysis is...

Recent bailouts in response to the subprime crisis evince an ad hoc government response that benefited general unsecured creditors and managers within the financial sector, while inflicting great loss upon taxpayers. The bailouts violated notions of the rule of law and sound macroeconomic...

Financial intermediaries may increase economic efficiency through intertemporal risk smoothing. However without an adequate regulation, intermediation may fail to do this. This paper studies the effects of a production shock in a closed economy and compares abilities of market-based and...

We consider an overlapping generations model with two production factors and two types of agents in the presence of financial intermediation and its application to the Russian default of August 1998. The paper focuses on the analysis of the consequences of a sudden negative repayments shock on...

In August 2007 the United Kingdom experienced its first bank run in over 140 years. Although Northern Rock was not a particularly large bank (it was at the time ranked 7th in terms of assets) it was nevertheless a significant retail bank and a substantial mortgage lender. In fact, ten years...

On 16th November 2009, SUERF, CEPS and the Belgian Financial Forum coorganized a conference "Crisis management at cross-roads" in Brussels. All papers in the present volume are based on contributions at the conference and the SUERF Annual Lecture which followed the event.