This paper investigates Alan Greenspan's claim that capital markets can serve as a financial “spare tire” in the event of a banking crisis. We test the impact of stock market capitalization and activity on the output losses of 76 banking crises in 66 countries over the period of 1975-2008....

We evaluate the claim that the International Monetary Fund precipitated financial crises during the 1990s by pressuring countries to liberalize their capital accounts prematurely. Using data from a panel of developing economies from the 1982-1998 period, we examine whether the changes in the...