This paper looks at the effects of International Monetary Fund (IMF) lending programs on banking crises in a large sample of developing countries, over the period 1970-2010. The endogeneity of the IMF intervention is addressed by adopting an instrumental variable strategy and a propensity score...

This paper compares three types of early warning indicators of financial instability – those based on financial market prices, those based on normalized measures of total credit and those based on liabilities of financial intermediaries. Prices perform well as concurrent indicators of market...

This paper shows how the role of Financial Soundness Indicators (FSIs) in financial surveillance can be usefully enhanced. Drawing from different statistical techniques, the paper illustrates that FSIs generate signals that can accurately detect, with 4 to 12 quarters lead, emerging financial...

We present a novel approach that incorporates individual entity stress testing and losses from systemic risk effects (SE losses) into macroprudential stress testing. SE losses are measured using a reduced-form model to value financial entity assets, conditional on macroeconomic stress and the...

We consider how fear of model misspecification on the part of the planner and/or the households affects welfare gains from optimal macroprudential taxes in an economy with occasionally binding collateral constraints as in Bianchi (2011). On the one hand, there exist welfare gains from...

This paper explores how much of the movements in the sovereign spreads of Asian economies over the course of the global financial crisis has reflected shifts in (i) global risk aversion; (ii) country-specific risks, directly from worsening fundamentals, and indirectly from spillovers originating...

This paper proposes a stochastic volatility model to measure sovereign financial distress. It examines howkey European sovereign credit default swap (CDS) spreads affect each other; specifically, the paperanalyses the volatility structure of Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Spain and Portugal....

Better “financial soundness” of banks could help mitigate the volatility of financial cycles by reducing banks' risk exposure. But trying to improve financial soundness in the midst of a downturn can do the opposite—further aggravating the contraction of credit. Consistent with this...

The paper studies how high household leverage and crises can arise as a result of changes in the income distribution. Empirically, the periods 1920-1929 and 1983-2008 both exhibited a large increase in the income share of high-income households, a large increase in debtleverage of the remainder,...

Motivated by the tension first revealed during the global financial crisis between thedomestic and international financial stability obligations of central bank reserve managers,this paper offers some reflections along four main lines. First, the paper highlights howofficial reserve management...