In fact, looking only at the level of an individual bank's balance sheet, the analysis and evaluation of risk exposures have become considerably more complex. First, technology and modeling advances have added complex products to banks' traditional exposures thereby complicating risk evaluation. Second, the evolution of banking activities and business strategies has meant that the credit risk o...

The recent crisis was characterized by massive illiquidity. This paper reviews what we know and don't know about illiquidity and all its friends: market freezes, fire sales, contagion, and ultimately insolvencies and bailouts. It first explains why liquidity cannot easily be apprehended through a single statistic, and asks whether liquidity should be regulated given that a capital adequacy requ...

The heterogeneity of the banking sector is a vital problem both in case conduct macroprudential policy, as well assessment its effectiveness. To address this issue, we construct new measure policy restrictiveness, bank’s free lending capacity ratio (the quotient bank can extend given capital surplus above requirement, and current volume loans). We describe advantages over measures used previous...

We examine what is perceived as one of the main culprits in the occurrence of banking crises: financial liberalization. As is typically argued, if liberalization is accompanied by insufficient prudential supervision of the banking sector, it will result in excessive risk taking by financial intermediaries and a subsequent crisis. Having evaluated the empirical validity of this hypothesis, we co...

This paper develops a dynamic two-country neoclassical stochastic growth model with incomplete markets. Short-term credit flows can be excessive and reverse suddenly. The equilibrium outcome is constrained inefficient. First, an undercapitalized country borrows too much since each individual firm does not internalize that an increase in production capacity undermines their output price and ther...

This paper develops a network model of interbank lending in which unsecured claims, repo activity and shocks to the haircuts applied to collateral assume centre stage. We show how systemic liquidity crises of the kind associated with the interbank market collapse of 2007–2008 can arise within such a framework, with funding contagion spreading widely through the web of interlinkages. Our model i...

This paper develops a simple business-cycle model in which the financial sector originates a structural change that has large macroeconomic effects when private agents are gradually learning their economic environment. When the persistence of the unobserved process driving financial shocks to the leverage ratio changes, the responses of output and other aggregates under adaptive learning are si...