Nigeria undertook a Financial Sector Assessment Program (FSAP), which included a review of the structure of Nigeria’s insurance market and the supervisory framework. The assessment was benchmarked against the Insurance Core Principles (ICPs) issued by the International Association of...

In recent years, the IMF has released a growing number of reports and other documents covering economic and financial developments and trends in member countries. Each report, prepared by a staff team after discussions with government officials, is published at the option of the member country.

This technical note presents stress testing of banking and insurance on the Isle of Man (IOM). The stress tests for the IOM Financial Sector Assessment Program Update have been designed to yield as comprehensive and detailed a picture as possible within the constraints of the approach and...

Following the introduction of the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU-ETS), CO2 emissions have become a tradable commodity. As a regulated party, emitters are forced to take into account the additional cost of carbon emissions in their production costs structure. Given the high...

This article investigates the exchange-rate exposure of S&P CNX 500 non-financial constituents during 2006–2011. By using a standard two-factor market model, we measure the sensitivity of stock returns to changes in the exchange rate and find that 11 per cent of sample firms are...

Risk management has become a central issue in sanitary crises. Agro food firms have devised organizational responses to sanitary risks, usually implying better traceability. European Regulation 178/2002 established mandatory traceability. This paper provides a critical appraisal of the European...

To date, an operational measure of systemic risk capturing non-linear tail comovement between system-wide and individual bank returns has not yet been developed. This paper proposes an extension of the so-called CoVaR measure that captures the asymmetric response of the banking system to...

We identify current challenges for creating stable, yet efficient financial systems using lessons from recent and past crises. Reforms need to start from three tenets: adopting a system-wide perspective explicitly aimed at addressing market failures; understanding and incorporating into...

Macro-prudential policies aimed at mitigating systemic financial risks have become part of the policy toolkit in many emerging markets and some advanced countries. Their effectiveness and efficacy are not well-known, however. Using panel data regressions, we analyze how changes in balance sheets...

Better “financial soundness†of banks could help mitigate the volatility of financial cycles by reducing banks’ risk exposure. But trying to improve financial soundness in the midst of a downturn can do the opposite—further aggravating the contraction of credit....