Policymakers often use guarantees on bank liabilities to prevent or contain bank runs during systemic banking crises, but their success has been debated. Using a sample of 42 episodes of banking crises, this paper finds that blanket guarantees do help to reduce liquidity pressures on banks, but...

This paper shows that with limited liability banks lever up excessively to finance new loans. Lower monetary policy rates can worsen or reduce these incentives depending on the size of the shock when equity financing is ruled out. When this constrained is relaxed but the bank faces costly...

When a central bank is in charge of both price and financial stability, a new time-inconsistency problem may arise. Monetary policy may be abused to reduce the private sector’s real debt burden after a financial shock materializes.

This paper provides new evidence on the unique role of trade credit and contracting terms as a way for both sellers and buyers to mange business risk. The authors use a novel and unique dataset on almost 30,000 supplier contracts for 56 large buyers and more than 24,000 suppliers in Europe and...

October 2000 - Financial liberalization reduces imperfections in financial markets by reducing the agency costs of financial leverage. Small firms gain most from liberalization, because the favoritism of preferential credit directed to large firms tends to disappear under liberalization. Laeven...

Banks restructured after East Asia's crisis of 1997 - most of them family-owned or company-owned and almost never foreign-owned - tended to be heavy risk takers. Most of them had excessive credit growth. - Laeven uses a linear programming technique (data envelopment analysis) to estimate the...