In the model a ...scal stabilisation is announced under asymmetry of information between the government and the private investors. The government could be of two types: a dry type and a wet type, according to the amount of spending cuts it decides to make. Private investors may thus lack con...dence in the stabilisation program and interest rates would be too high, re‡ecting this lack of credib...

The aim of this paper is to examine what has been the role of information provision to the market throughout the crisis. We consider two main sources of information to the market, financial statements and information provided by credit rating agencies. We examine how these sources of information work and the effectiveness of their disclosure process during the crisis. Contrary to the commonly h...

This paper traces developments in the credit risk measurement literature over the last 20 years. The paper is essentially divided into two parts. In the ®rst part the evolution of the literature on the credit-risk measurement of individual loans and portfolios of loans is traced by way of reference to articles appearing in relevant issues of the Journal of Banking and Finance and other publicat...

In this paper we investigate the long run relationship between financial depth and economic growth, trying to utilize the data in the most efficient manner via panel unit root tests and panel cointegration analysis. In addition, we use threshold cointegration tests, and dynamic panel data estimation for a panel-based vector error correction model. The long run relationship is estimated using fu...

In recent years, securitization and other ®nancial innovations have provided unprecedented opportunities for banks to reduce substantially their regulatory capital requirements with little or no corresponding reduction in their overall economic risks ± a process termed ``regulatory capital arbitrage''. These methods are used routinely to lower the e€ective risk-based capital requirements agains...

We propose a relatively simple, accurate and flexible approach to forecasting the distribution of defaulted debt recovery outcomes. Our approach is based on mixtures of Gaussian distributions, explicitly conditioned on borrower characteristics, debt instrument characteristics and credit conditions at the time of default. Using Moody’s Ultimate Recovery Database, we show that our mixture specifi...

This paper examines the association between government ownership and bank stability over 1997-2010 across a sample of 103 countries. With a continuous variable to proxy for government ownership, our system GMM estimates indicate that the association between government ownership and bank stability depends on a country’s economic development and regulatory quality. In developed, high income count...

Credit rating agencies (CRAs) very often have been criticized for announcing inaccurate credit ratings and are suspected of being exposed to con‡icts of interest. Despite these objections CRAs remained largely unregulated. Based on Pagano & Immordino (2007), we study the optimal regulation of CRAs in a model where rating quality is unobservable and enforcing regulation is costly. The model show...

Information sharing about borrowers’ characteristics and their indebtedness can have important effects on credit markets activity. First, it improves the banks’ knowledge of applicants’ characteristics and permits a more accurate prediction of their repayment probabilities. Second, it reduces the informational rents that banks could otherwise extract from their customers. Third, it can operate ...

This paper provides parametric estimates of technical change, e¢ ciency change, economies of scale, and total factor productivity growth for large banks (those with assets in excess of $1 billion) in the United States, over the period from 2000 to 2005. In doing so, we propose a distance function based primal total factor productivity growth index, which is valid under both perfect and imperfec...