ANDREW Haldane, Executive Director for Financial Stability of the Bank of England, once compared the collapse of the investment banking firm Lehman Brothers in late 2008 to a virus outbreak. Fear that Lehman’s demise would spread caused widespread panic that led to a freeze in borrowing and lending in a number of financial markets—much like the fear of a virus might lead people to avoid contact...

Requiring many financial institutions to hold a risk-adjusted amount of capital when granting funds, the Basel II framework implies a risk dependent cost of capital for borrowing firms from year-end 2006 onwards. This novel policy of allocating capital creates and intensifies new challenges for manufacturing companies in innovative and capital intensive branches. In this regard, banks and other...

Declining real estate values have shaken financial markets, undermined consumer confidence, and slowed economic growth around the world. From homeowners in California to billionaire real estate developers operating in New York, London, and Tokyo, all have seen their net worth dwindle as real estate prices have fallen. Sizable holdings of nonperforming real estate imperil the financial health of...

Many entrepreneurs who close a business are actually willing to venture anew. However, to realize a restart is not only a matter of willingness on the part of the entrepreneur but also of its feasibility. Regarding the feasibility of a restart, the aspect of capital acquisition might be particularly precarious for renascent entrepreneurs since business closures are likely to come up with financ...

Financial institutions like banks make extensive use of information systems and information technology, but they are risk-averse and slow to adopt new technology. In this paper, we explore how the new paradigm of objectoriented analysis and design can be used to advantage in banking information systems. We identify the similarities among the different financial instruments offered by banks and ...

During extreme financial crises, all of a sudden, the financial world that was once rife with profit opportunities for financial institutions (banks, for short) becomes exceedingly complex. Confusion and uncertainty follow, ravaging financial markets and triggering massive flight-to-quality episodes. In this paper we propose a model of this phenomenon. In our model, banks normally collect infor...

Innovations in electronic banking in Iran have led to the development in capacities such as payment instruments and transactions by cards, which are known as electronic payment equipment in the Iranian banking network. Financial supervision is required to be increasingly based on reporting and regulatory processes to efficiently and proactively monitor risk and compliance at banks and financial...

Evidence suggests that banks, like firms, face financial frictions when raising funds. The authors develop a quantitative, monetary business cycle model in which agency problems affect both the relationship between banks and firms and the relationship between banks and their depositors. As a result, bank capital and entrepreneurial net worth jointly determine aggregate investment, and are impor...

The theory of the optimal allocation of risk and the Townsend Thai panel data on financial transactions are used to assess the impact of the major formal and informal financial institutions of an emerging market economy. We link financial institution assessment to the actual impact on clients, rather than ratios and non-performing loans. We derive both consumption and investment equations from ...

Currently, huge electronic data repositories are being maintained by banks and other financial institutions. Valuable bits of information are embedded in these data repositories. The huge size of these data sources make it impossible for a human analyst to come up with interesting information (or patterns) that will help in the decision making process. A number of commercial enterprises have be...