Haku

The recent financial crises have brought into focus questions regarding the quality of banks' assets. We study the patterns in banks reserving for and reporting of loan losses in the EU before and after implementation of ...

Do the prevailing unusually and persistently low real interest rates reflect a decline in the natural rate of interest as commonly thought? We argue that this is only part of the story. The critical role of financial factors ...

We document a considerable increase in foreign financing by the corporate sector in emerging economies (EMEs) since the early 2000s, mainly in the form of bond issuance, and claim that it has opened up an important channel ...

This paper develops a two-country model in which transmission of financial shocks arises despite a flexible exchange rate regime and substitutable financial assets, contrary to the open-economy literature results under ...

When taking on new debt, borrowers commit to a pre-specified path of future debt service. This implies a predictable lag between credit booms and peaks in debt service which, in a panel of household debt in 17 countries, ...

The global financial crisis has led to increased attention on the relationship of household indebtedness and systemic risks. As a result, macroprudential measures aimed at reducing the risks have been introduced in many ...

We assess the extent to which discretion, unexplained variations in the terms of a loan contract, has varied across time and lending institutions and show that part of this discretion is due to private information that ...

We show that borrowing firms benefit substantially from important enforcement actions issued on U.S. banks for safety and soundness reasons. Using hand-collected data on such actions from the main three U.S. regulators and ...

Does democratization reduce the cost of credit? Using global syndicated loan data from 1984 to 2014, we find that democratization has a sizeable negative effect on loan spreads: a one-point increase in the zero-to-ten ...

We investigate how the business, credit and interest rate cycles affect the monetary transmission mechanism, using state-dependent local projection methods and data from 18 advanced economies. We exploit the time-series ...