More than 100 episodes of bank insolvencies have been documented by Caprio and Klingebiel (1996) for the period from 1980 to 1995 - and this does not include the Asian crisis. About 75 percent of these were classified as major insolvencies with potential systemic implications. The overwhelming...

The objectives of this paper are, first, to analyze whether banks' risk-taking can be explained by factors contributing to implicit guarantees and by factors associated with banks' business models. Second, it analyzes how risk-taking associated with these factors has changed from a period before...