This paper develops a model of private debt financing under inefficient financial intermediation. It suggests a mechanism that can generate the following sequence of events observed in the recent Asian crisis: A period of relatively low capital flow despite a steady improvement in economic...

This study finds that equity returns in the banking sector in the wake of the Great Recession and the European sovereign debt crisis have been driven mainly by weak growth prospects and heightened sovereign risk and to a lesser extent, by deteriorating funding conditions and investor sentiment....

Systemic risk remains a major concern to policymakers since widespread defaults in the corporate and financial sectors could pose substantial costs to society. Forward-looking measures and/or indicators of systemic default risk are thus needed to identify potential buildups of vulnerability in...

The 2008/9 financial crisis highlighted the importance of evaluating vulnerabilities owing to interconnectedness, or Too-Connected-to-Fail risk, among financial institutions for country monitoring, financial surveillance, investment analysis and risk management purposes. This paper illustrates...

The recent financial crisis has highlighted once more that interconnectedness in the financial system is a major source of systemic risk. I suggest a practical way to levy regulatory capital charges based on the degree of interconnectedness among financial institutions. Namely, the charges are...

This paper focuses on the investment behavior of pension funds in developed and emerging market countries. First, it analyzes the main determinants of the emerging market asset allocation of pension funds in developed countries. Second, it assesses how pension funds in emerging markets have...

In this paper, we use the extreme value theory (EVT) framework to analyze contagion risk across the international banking system. We test for the likelihood that an extreme shock affecting a major, systemic U.K. bank would also affect another large local or foreign counterpart, and vice-versa....

This paper examines some of the factors that have been influential in keeping inflation low in the United States during 1995–98, despite strong growth and high levels of employment. Our results identify three important variables: declines in import prices, a slowdown in the growth of nonwage...

This paper assesses productivity trends in Canada vis-a-vis the United States from two perspectives. The first one is based on estimates of total factor productivity. The second one decomposes productivity growth into two sources: investment-specific technical change, associated with...