Using data on listed bankes in 51 countries, we analyze whether banks' dividend payouts are influenced by the relative strengths of the agency conflicts faced by their shareholders and creditors. We show that dividend policy depends on the relative strengths of these agency conflicts, but with a...

We re-examine the probabilistic foundation of the link between Z-score measures and banks' probability of insolvency, offering an improved measure of that probability without imposing further distributional assumptions. While the traditional measure of the probability of insolvency thus provides...

A dynamic provisioning system is one of the instruments that regulators could use for introducing counter-cyclicality into prudential regulation. The potential effectiveness of such instrument depends on how far actual backward-looking provisioning practices exacerbate growth in bank lending. We...

We examine prospects for a monetary union in the East African Community (EAC) by developing a stylized model of policymakers' decision problem that allows for uncertain benefits derived from monetary, financial and fiscal stability, and then calibrating the model for the EAC for the period...

We empirically examine whether the way a bank might use loan loss provisions to smooth its income is influenced by its ownership concentration and the regulatory environment. Using a panel of European commercial banks, we find evidence that banks with more concentrated ownership use...