This paper estimates dynamic efficiency in the Spanish construction industry before and during the current financial crisis over the period 2001-2009. Static efficiency measures are biased in a context of a significant economic crisis with large investments and disinvestments as they do not account for costs in the adjustment of quasi-fixed factors. The results show that overall dynamic cost in...

When analysing the current financial crisis the temptation might arise to attribute all the responsibilities to the excesses of the US financial system. I think this would be a mistake. While excessive debt creation and risk mispricing are clearly the root cause of the crisis, we should not forget that in order to make a market you need buyers and sellers. And this crisis is as much a crisis of...

This paper analyzes the causes and consequences of the financial crisis in East Asia. We have examined which of the two alternatives--panic or fundamentals--was a crucial feature. While our empirical analysis is inconclusive on the relative importance of the two views, it suggests that the massive inflow of foreign capital into the region during the 1990s was at the center of the East Asian fin...

Shadow banking is a term that came out of the financial crisis of 2007-2009. There is a belief that shadow banking was one of the crisis reasons. Because the excessive expansion of shadow banking endangers the financial stability of countries, this paper examines the impact of shadow banking on financial stability using data from 14 countries of the G20 during 2002-2018. We divided countries in...

The current financial crisis reminds us about previous economic crisis that have remained in history, as well as of large bankruptcies that were largely debated within trade literature, which themselves also comprise similarity elements with nowadays situation. We therefore couldn’t agree more with George Bernard Shaw who used to say that “We learn from history that we learn nothing from histor...

In the wake of the global financial crisis much attention has been devoted to the role of complexity of bank linkages in the transmission of shocks. We shed light on this issue using a rich dataset on international syndicated bank lending matched with bank financial information. To study how financial crises spread through the global banking network, we distinguish among channels such as banks'...

Prior to the 2007–2008 financial crisis, banking sector profits were very high but the profitability of financial intermediation was poor. Using a novel model of banking, this article argues that the high profits were achieved through balance sheet expansion and growing default, liquidity, and term risk mismatches between assets and liabilities. As a result, large banks’ financial leverage rose...