We calculate abnormal stock returns for Japanese non-financial companies around major events associated with the banking crisis (1995–2000), and find that not all companies were equally sensitive to the malaise of the banking sector: the most affected were small, leveraged, low-tech companies with low credit ratings and low market to book ratios. This is consistent with ‘‘credit crunch’’ theori...

This paper estimates a structural demand model for commercial bank deposit services in order to measure the effects on consumers given dramatic changes in bank services throughout US branching deregulation in the 1990s. Following the discrete choice literature, consumer decisions are based on prices and bank characteristics. Consumers are found to respond to deposit rates, and to a lesser exten...

We examine the effect of house price appreciation on bank loan portfolios during the 1996—2006 period. While most previous research in this area has concentrated on loan demand effects, we evaluate how house prices affect a bank’s credit supply. Controlling for possible simultaneity between house prices and bank loan portfolio growth, we find that banks affected by greater house price appreciat...

Since 1990, federal bank supervisors have announced formal enforcement actions publicly. The change in regime provides a natural laboratory to test two propositions: (1) claims by economists that putting confidential supervisory information in the public domain will enhance market discipline and (2) claims by bank supervisors that releasing such data will spark runs. To evaluate these propositi...

This paper utilises the non-parametric frontier approach, DEA, to analyse the technical and scale efficiency in Japanese banking using a recent cross –section sample. Efficiency analysis is conducted across individual banks, bank types and bank size groups. Following Berger and Humphrey (1997), problem loans are controlled for as an exogenous influence on bank efficiency. Powerful size-efficien...

Article history: Received 30 May 2011 Received in revised form 7 November 2011 Accepted 20 December 2011 Available online 29 December 2011 We investigate bank risk taking, efficiency and their relation to law enforcement using a unique sample of 133 Chinese city commercial banks across 31 regions for the 1999–2008 period. We find that stronger law enforcement tends to promote greater bank risk ...

A model of a dependent central bank that internalizes the government’s budget constraint is used to examine the optimal composition of the euro zone. The model embodies the desire to stimulate output and to provide monetary financing to governments. Unable to pre-commit to first-best policies, the central bank produces excess inflation — a tendency partially reduced in a monetary union. On the ...

I study the optimal architecture of bank supervision in a federal system. A central supervisor gets information about a bank, for instance through stress-testing, and decides whether an on-site examination should be performed by a local or a central authority. Local supervisors have lower inspection costs, but do not internalize crossborder externalities. The optimal degree of centralization de...

This article discusses the impact of dollarization in Ecuador, Panama and El Salvador as well Argentine convertibility system. We found that adoption a more stable currency has had positive results those countries.
 Key words: Dollarization, Inflation, Central Bank, Balance Trade, Gold Standard, Cash Ratio, Exports, Flexible Exchange Rates.
 JEL Classification: E42, E44, E58.
 Re...