Search Results
Journal Article
Monetary explanations of the Great Depression: a selective survey of empirical evidence
Seventy years after the Great Depression, economists still debate the causes of this economic catastrophe. Two leading explanations are distinguished by whether or not the Federal Reserve?s monetary policies are perceived as being chiefly responsible for propagating and magnifying the initial contraction into a depression. ; This article surveys recent modeling efforts and empirical work that examine aggregate explanations for the Great Depression from both the extensive literature using vector autoregression techniques and the more recent literature using dynamic stochastic general ...
Working Paper
Financial crises and bank failures: a review of prediction methods
In this article we analyze financial and economic circumstances associated with the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis and the global financial turmoil that has led to severe crises in many countries. We suggest that the level of cross-border holdings of long-term securities between the United States and the rest of the world may indicate a direct link between the turmoil in the securitized market originated in the United States and that in other countries. We provide a summary of empirical results obtained in several Economics and Operations Research papers that attempt to explain, predict, or ...
Journal Article
Investment analysts' forecasts of earnings
The literature on investment analysts' forecasts of firms' earnings and their forecast errors is enormous. This paper summarizes the evidence on the distribution of analysts' forecasts and forecast errors using data for all U.S. firms from 1990 to 2004. The evidence indicates substantial asymmetry of earnings, earning forecasts, and forecast errors. There is strong support for average and median earning forecasts being higher than actual earnings a year before the earnings announcement. Such differences between earnings and forecasts also exist across time periods and industries. A month ...
Working Paper
Further evidence on the link between finance and growth: an international analysis of community banking and economic performance
We try to contribute to both the finance-growth literature and the community banking literature by testing the effects of the relative health of community banks on economic growth, and investigating potential transmission mechanisms for these effects using data from 1993-2000 on 49 nations. Data from both developed and developing nations suggest that greater market shares and efficiency ranks of small, private, domestically-owned banks are associated with better economic performance, and that the marginal benefits of higher shares are greater when the banks are more efficient. Only mixed ...
Conference Paper
The effects of focus and diversification on bank risk and return: evidence from individual bank loan portfolios
We study empirically the effect of focus (specialization) vs. diversification on the return and the risk of banks using data from 105 Italian banks over the period 1993?1999. Specifically, we analyze the tradeoffs between (loan portfolio) focus and diversification using a unique data set that is able to identify individual bank loan exposures to different industries, to different sectors, and to different geographical regions. Our results are consistent with a theory that predicts a deterioration in bank monitoring quality at high levels of risk and a deterioration in bank monitoring quality ...
Working Paper
Suspension of payments, bank failures, and the nonbank public's losses
Arguably, eliminating suspensions of payments--periods when banks jointly refuse to convert their liabilities into outside money or other assets--was an important impetus for creating the Federal Reserve. Friedman and Schwartz suggest that a suspension in 1930 would have decreased the severity of the Great Depression. More recently, an emerging literature suggests that suspensions of payments may well be optimal in some states of the world. We present evidence about suspensions of payments from an episode that is close to a controlled experiment for examining their effects. In 1861, about 44 ...