The privatization of the Italian savings banks is often described as a success story. Proponents of privatization argue that a similar reform could cure the current problems in the German banking sector. In this paper, we ask whether the Italian experience can really serve as a role model for...

The financial crisis that swept across northern Europe in 1763 bears an uncanny resemblance to more recent episodes of financial market turbulence - in particular, to the events of autumn 1998 when mature financial markets were caught in a severe liquidity crisis, culminating in the near...

Using information on banks' balance sheets, we analyze the causal links between the banking and the currency problems in the German financial crisis of 1931. We find that the currency problems were caused by political shocks, while the problems in the banking sector were the result of excessive...

The financial crisis that swept across northern Europe in 1763 bears a strong resemblance to more recent episodes of financial distress. The combination of the specific contractual arrange-ments at the time, interlocking credit relationships, and the high leverage of market participants...

Using monthly balance-sheet data of all major German credit banks, we analyze deposit withdrawals and bank failures in the German banking and currency crisis of 1931. We show that deposit withdrawals were related to indicators of banks' liquidity and solvency and were hence not simply the...

The explicit or implicit protection of banks through government bail-out policies is a universal phenomenon. We analyze the competitive effects of such policies in two models with different degrees of transparency in the banking sector. Our main result is that the bail-out policy unambiguously...

We analyze the effects of bailout expectations on sovereign bond spreads in emerging markets. The non-bailout of Russia in August 1998 is interpreted as an event that decreased the perceived probability of future crisis lending to emerging markets. If official rescues are expected to mitigate...

This paper yields a rationale for why subsidized public banks may be desirable from a regional perspective in a financially integrated economy. We present a model with credit rationing and heterogeneous regions in which public banks prevent a capital drain from poorer to richer regions by...