This paper focuses on some of the major problems of the Hungarian banking system and investigates the possible ways to deal with these problems. It discusses the issue of bank restructuring, concentrating on the large commercial banks for which direct or indirect state ownership is decisive....

This paper unveils a new resource for macroeconomic research: a long-run dataset covering disaggregated bank credit for 17 advanced economies since 1870. The new data show that the share of mortgages on banks’ balance sheets doubled in the course of the 20th century, driven by a sharp rise of...

Is there a link between loose monetary conditions, credit growth, house price booms, and financial instability? This paper analyzes the role of interest rates and credit in driving house price booms and busts with data spanning 140 years of modern economic history in the advanced economies. We...

Confirmation bias refers to cognitive errors that bias one towards one's own prior beliefs. A vast empirical literature documents its existence and psychologists identify it as one of the most problematic aspects of human reasoning. In this paper, we present three related scenarios where...

This Paper analyses the effect of dynamic capital structure adjustments on credit risk. Firms may optimally adjust their leverage in response to stochastic changes in firm value. It is shown that capital structure dynamics lower optimal initial leverage ratios but increase both fair credit...

This paper analyses the distribution and allocation of budgetary subsidies and tax arrears in Central and Eastern Europe. Budgetary subsidies are relatively small in aggregate, highly sector specific, and the manufacturing sector receives few of them. Tax arrears, by contrast, are a significant...

We use spatial regression discontinuity analysis to test whether the historical partition of Poland among three empires—Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Prussia—has a persistent effect on political outcomes in contemporary Poland and to examine the channels of this influence. We find that the...

Private pension provision faces the challenging task of providing stable income streams during retirement. The challenge has increased markedly in the last decades due to volatile financial markets, falling interest rates and the withdrawal of employers and external insurers as risk bearers of...

We consider the debt capacity of a risky asset when debt is being rolled over and there is a liquidation cost in case of default. We show that debt capacity depends on how information about the quality of the asset is revealed. When the information structure is based on “optimistic”...

Internal credit ratings are expected to gain in importance because of their potential use for determining regulatory capital adequacy and banks’ increasing focus on the risk-return profile in commercial lending. Therefore, the components of internal credit ratings merit not only a qualitative...