The purpose of this paper is to examine the determinants of the timing of bank failure/merger in 10 Asian countries over the period of 1999-2007 using a multivariate logit model and a split population duration analysis. Apart from bank-specific information, we also focus on the effects of macroeconomic and financial characteristics. The following empirical findings are obtained. First, the resu...

O ver the course of the recent financial crisis, several large financial institutions experienced sudden, massive withdrawals of their usual funding sources. In the U.K., for example, depositors lost confidence in the bank Northern Rock and started a run of withdrawals that ended with the bank being taken into state ownership. In the United States, the investment bank Bear Stearns and the comme...

How Well Capitalized Are Well-Capitalized Banks? T he wave of bank and savings and loan failures in the 1980s and early 1990s, and the resulting losses to deposit insurance funds, served to highlight the need for banks to hold sufficient capital to survive difficult times. In addition, many argued that deposit insurance made it imperative that banks be better capitalized, since deposit insuranc...

The decade of the 1980s has been a particularly turbulent one for the U.S. banking and financial system. Since the establishment of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) in 1933, more than 1,500 banks have been declared officially insolvent and were subsequently closed, acquired, or received assistance to prevent closure (see table 1). More than 800 of these closures took place durin...

We extend beyond healthiness assessment of banks using quantitative financial data by applying textual sentiment analysis. Looking at 10-K annual reports for a large sample of banks in the 2000-2014 period, 52 public bank holding companies that were associated with bank failures during the global financial crisis serve as a natural experiment. Utilizing negative and positive dictionaries propos...

We develop and implement new tests for the completeness of rural labor markets in sub-Saharan Africa. Our approach builds on the seminal work of Benjamin (1992), which uses consumer-producer households as a window into the functioning of rural markets. We use nationally representative panel data from Ethiopia, Malawi, Tanzania, and Uganda to extend a similar set of tests to a dynamic setting. W...

Although there are many definitions of systemic risk, most agree that it manifests itself by an initial shock that results in the failure of one or more banks and then spreads out to the entire system by a contagion mechanism which can result in the failure of more banks in the system. Assuming that bank failures in the initial shock are randomly dependent on the failure probabilities of the in...

This paper reviews Latin American neoliberal health reforms sponsored by the IMF and the World Bank, and analyzes the impact on the region of decentralization and privatization, the two basic components of the reforms. The second part of the paper examines in some detail the Chilean and Colombian reforms, the two countries that have implemented closely the principles of the neoliberal reform. T...

considering significant influence of financial crisis on the economy as a whole, policymakers spend remarkable resources on supervision and methods to ensure about sustainable financial system . a non-performing loan, or npl, is a loan that is in default or close to being in default. many loans become non-performing after being in default for 90 days, but this can depend on the contract termsan...

Decentralization facilitates more efficient use of local information but also can lead to agency problems and commitment failures. This paper develops simple models of a twotier hierarchy (the center vs. the local) to study the optimal division of lending authority between central and local bank managers. Using a unique data set collected by the authors from a survey of rural financial institut...