The recent credit crisis started as a credit shock and then rapidly promulgated in the form of market and funding illiquidity before inducing solvency problems at some financial institutions. This column presents empirical evidence mapping the transmission channels of the crisis

A theoretical framework to assess the degree of fragility or, inversely, the soundness of the banking system is proposed. It is argued that, while a bank may be either solvent or insolvent at any given time, its degree of fragility must be a forward-looking measure based on the probability that...

This paper investigates whether financial crises are alike by considering whether a single modeling framework can fit multiple distinct crises in which contagion effects link markets across national borders and asset classes. The crises considered are Russia and LTCM in the second half of 1998,...

The existing literature suggests a number of alternative methods to test for the presence of contagion during financial market crises. This paper reviews those methods and shows how they are related in a unified framework. A number of extensions are also suggested that allow for multivariate...

This paper modifies several assumptions in the probabilistic approach to fiscal sustainability proposed by Celasun, Debrun, and Ostry (2007). First, we allow for structural breaks in the vector autoregression model for the macroeconomic variables. Second, in the Monte-Carlo simulations, we draw...

This paper relaxes some key assumptions in the probabilistic approach to fiscal sustainability. First, we identify structural breaks over the sample period used to estimate the covariance matrix of the shocks to the debt ratios. Second, the assumption of Normality of the shocks is dropped by...