We examine the evolution of the Icelandic banking sector in its macroeconomic environment. The story culminates in the crisis of October 2008, when all three major banks in Iceland collapsed in three successive days. The country is still struggling to cope with the consequences. The paper...

A key precursor of twentieth-century financial crises in emerging and advanced economies alike was the rapid buildup of leverage. Those emerging economies that avoided leverage booms during the 2000s also were most likely to avoid the worst effects of the twenty-first century’s first global...

Banking systems have rapidly grown to a point where for many countries bank assets amount to multiples of GDP. As a consequence, government’s capacity to provide stability-enhancing fiscal guarantees against systemic crises can no longer be taken for granted. As regulation of dynamic financial...

Banking systems have rapidly grown to a point where for many countries bank assets amount to multiples of GDP. As a consequence, governmentfs capacity to provide stability-enhancing fiscal guarantees against systemic crises can no longer be taken for granted. As regulation of dynamic financial...

This paper discusses several key issues regarding the current Great Crisis, which has extended over two periods. The first period covered the 2007-09 subprime crisis in the US, while the second took the form of a twin sovereign debt and banking crisis in Europe after 2010, and persists until...

This paper investigates leading indicators of systemic banking crises in a panel of 11 EU countries, with a particular focus on Finland. We use quarterly data from 1980Q1 to 2013Q2, in order to create a large number of macro-financial indicators, as well as their various transformations. We make...

This paper investigates leading indicators of systemic banking crises in a panel of 11 EU countries, with a particular focus on Finland. We use quarterly data from 1980Q1 to 2013Q2, in order to create a large number of macro-financial indicators, as well as their various transformations. We make...

A crisis provides an opportunity to examine how an economy works under pathological conditions. What are the lessons? Markets work well most of the time. That said, the global financial crisis has weakened faith in the market’s self-equilibrating qualities. Fiscal policy works well to offset...

Each area is influenced by globalization and the financial markets are not only an exception but these can be considered a real engine of the globalization. It is obvious that we can’t talk only about a national market but of a financial market which works at a global level. The present events...

This paper analyzes sovereign risk contagion in the Eurozone using an extension to the canonical model for contagion proposed by Pesaran and Pick (2007) and Metiu (2012) to allow for time-varying coefficients. This becomes necessary due to changes in the risk pricing of sovereign bonds since the...