We study experimental coordination games to examine through which transmission channels, and under which information conditions, a panic-based depositor-run at one bank may trigger a panic-based depositor-run at another bank. We find that withdrawals at one bank trigger withdrawals at another bank by increasing players’ beliefs that other depositors in their own bank will withdraw, making them ...

The effects of improving covariate measurement are investigated when the covariate is endogenous even in the absence of measurement error. Reducing measurement error can exacerbate the finite sample bias of Two-Stage Least Squares. An application reveals this is of practical importance. JEL: C36, C81

The author develops the first comparative empirical study of bank failures during the nineties between East Asia and Latin America using bank-level data, in order to address the following two questions: (i) To what extent did individual bank conditions explain bank failures? (ii) Did mainly the weakest banks, in terms of their fundamentals, fail in the crisis countries? The main results for Eas...

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...

A new method of decomposing cross-sectional poverty estimates into chronic and transient components is demonstrated using data from a recent household survey in Papua New Guinea. This method is simpler than previously used panel methods because it does not require data on every household in every period. The only requirement is that a subset of the surveyed households have a repeat observation ...

Bank crises, by interrupting liquidity provision, have been viewed as resulting in welfare losses. In a model of banking with moral hazard, we show that second best bank contracts that improve on autarky ex ante require costly crises to occur with positive probability at the interim stage. When bank payoffs are partially appropriable, either directly via imposition of fines or indirectly by the...

The paper analyzes the information and agency cost effects of bank equity stakes in a universal banking system where banks can also be shareholders in borrowing firms. We test the agency and signaling hypotheses explaining the bank motivations for holding equity of borrowing firms in the Spanish market and we analyze the share abnormal returns around the announcements of bank equity holdings. T...

Innovation occurs in network environments. Identifying the important players in the innovative process, namely “the innovators”, is key to understanding the process of innovation. Doing this requires flexible analysis tools tailored to work well with complex datasets generated within such environments. One such tool, cluster analysis, organizes a large data set into discrete groups based ...

International Comparisons of Work Disability Self-reported work disability is analyzed in the US, the UK and the Netherlands. Different wordings of the questions lead to different work disability rates. But even if identical questions are asked, cross-country differences remain substantial. Respondent evaluations of work limitations of hypothetical persons described in vignettes are used to ide...

Investigation of peer effects on achievement with sample survey data on schools may mean that only a random sample of peers is observed for each individual. This generates classical measurement error in peer variables, resulting in the estimated peer group effects in a regression model being biased towards zero under OLS model fitting. We investigate the problem using survey data for England fr...