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The right of governments to employ capital controls has always been the official orthodoxy of the International Monetary Fund, and the organization's formal rules providing this right have not changed significantly since the IMF was founded in 1945. But informally, among the staff inside the IMF, these controls became heresy in the 1980s and 1990s, prompting critics to accuse the IMF of indiscriminately encouraging the liberalization of controls and precipitating a wave of financial crises in emerging markets in the late 1990s. In Capital Ideas, Jeffrey Chwieroth explores the inner workings of the IMF to understand how its staff's thinking about capital controls changed so radically. In doing so, he also provides an important case study of how international organizations work and evolve.

This study examines banking stability in Southeast Europe by analyzing both financial and institutional factors by using the Z-score as a key metric. On the basis of covering the period of 2012–2023, the research evaluates the impact of capital adequacy, lending rates, non-performing loans, rule of law, regulatory quality, control of corruption, judicial efficiency, and government integrity. The analysis combines static Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) and dynamic Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) methods on panel data. The key findings reveal that capital adequacy, non-performing loans, and regulatory quality positively influence banking stability, thereby suggesting the benefits of strong financial regulation. Conversely, control of corruption and weak government integrity negatively affect stability, highlighting institutional weaknesses. A novel aspect of the study lies in comparing the static and dynamic models: while OLS results show the rule of law as significant and positive and judicial effectiveness as negative, the GMM model finds these institutional variables largely insignificant. This divergence emphasizes the importance of using multidimensional empirical approaches to assess the complex interplay of governance and financial performance in the banking sector. The study ultimately demands strengthened legal and regulatory institutions to enhance banking stability in the region.

We relate trade credit to product characteristics and aspects of bank—firm relationships and document three main empirical regularities. First, the use of trade credit is associated with the nature of the transacted good. In particular, suppliers of differentiated products and services have larger accounts receivable than suppliers of standardized goods and firms buying more services receive cheaper trade credit for longer periods. Second, firms receiving trade credit secure financing from relatively uninformed banks. Third, a majority of the firms in our sample appear to receive trade credit at low cost. Additionally, firms that are more creditworthy and have some buyer market power receive larger early payment discounts.

The regulation of bank capital as a means of smoothing the credit cycle is a central element of forthcoming macro-prudential regimes internationally. For such regulation to be effective in controlling the aggregate supply of credit it must be the case that: (i) changes in capital requirements affect loan supply by regulated banks, and (ii) unregulated substitute sources of credit are unable to offset changes in credit supply by affected banks. This paper examines micro evidence—lacking to date—on both questions, using a unique data set. In the UK, regulators have imposed time-varying, bank-specific minimum capital requirements since Basel I. It is found that regulated banks (UK-owned banks and resident foreign subsidiaries) reduce lending in response to tighter capital requirements. But unregulated banks (resident foreign branches) increase lending in response to tighter capital requirements on a relevant reference group of regulated banks. This \"leakage\" is substantial, amounting to about one-third of the initial impulse from the regulatory change.

We provide evidence that creditors play an active role in the governance of corporations well outside of payment default states. By examining the Securities and Exchange Commission's filings of all U. S. nonfinancial firms from 1996 through 2008, we document that, in any given year, between 10% and 20% of firms report being in violation of a financial covenant in a credit agreement. We show that violations are followed immediately by a decline in acquisitions and capital expenditures, a sharp reduction in leverage and shareholder payouts, and an increase in CEO turnover. The changes in the investment and financing behavior of violating firms coincide with amended credit agreements that contain stronger restrictions on firm decision-making; changes in the management of violating firms suggest that creditors also exert informal influence on corporate governance. Finally, we show that firm operating and stock price performance improve post-violation. We conclude that actions taken by creditors increase the value of the average violating firm.

This paper examines why credit constraints for domestic and exporting firms arise in a setting where banks do not observe firms' productivities. To maintain incentive compatibility, banks lend below the amount that firms need for optimal production. The longer time needed for export shipments induces a tighter credit constraint on exporters than on purely domestic firms. In our application to Chinese firms, we find that the credit constraint is more stringent as a firm's export share grows, as the time to ship for exports is lengthened, and as there is greater dispersion of firms' productivities, reflecting more incomplete information.

Before the twentieth century, personal debt resided on the fringes of the American economy, the province of small-time criminals and struggling merchants. By the end of the century, however, the most profitable corporations and banks in the country lent money to millions of American debtors. How did this happen? The first book to follow the history of personal debt in modern America,Debtor Nationtraces the evolution of debt over the course of the twentieth century, following its transformation from fringe to mainstream--thanks to federal policy, financial innovation, and retail competition. How did banks begin making personal loans to consumers during the Great Depression? Why did the government invent mortgage-backed securities? Why was all consumer credit, not just mortgages, tax deductible until 1986? Who invented the credit card? Examining the intersection of government and business in everyday life, Louis Hyman takes the reader behind the scenes of the institutions that made modern lending possible: the halls of Congress, the boardrooms of multinationals, and the back rooms of loan sharks. America's newfound indebtedness resulted not from a culture in decline, but from changes in the larger structure of American capitalism that were created, in part, by the choices of the powerful--choices that made lending money to facilitate consumption more profitable than lending to invest in expanded production. From the origins of car financing to the creation of subprime lending,Debtor Nationpresents a nuanced history of consumer credit practices in the United States and shows how little loans became big business.

In this paper we use a disequilibrium framework common in the \"credit crunch\" literature, first to examine whether the slow credit growth in Morocco during the rapid expansion of liquidity in the first half of the decade can be attributed to credit rationing, and second to investigate the role of asset price increases in the recent acceleration of credit growth. Our results do not support the credit rationing hypothesis in the first half of the decade. They do however, show that the recent increase in real estate prices stimulated credit supply and demand, with a stronger effect on the latter.

Since the summer of 2007, credit markets in almost all industrial countries have been in substantial turmoil and this has become the focus of intense policy debates. The papers in this volume are contributed by the world's leading financial experts and constitute a thorough examination of the first credit market turmoil of the 21st Century. They provide an overview of the main causes, transmission mechanisms and economic implications of what by now has become a major systemic financial crisis. They assess the most important policy considerations and conclude about how to stabilize financial systems, attenuate repercussions on the real economy and shape future regulatory structures. The analyses, conclusions, and recommendations can be expected to influence both public and private policies to mitigate, if not prevent, such crises in the future.

It is generally presumed that stronger legal enforcement of lender rights increases credit access for all borrowers because it expands the set of incentive compatible loan contracts. This result relies on an assumption that the supply of credit is infinitely elastic. In contrast, with inelastic supply, stronger enforcement generates general equilibrium effects that may reduce credit access for small borrowers and expand it for wealthy borrowers. In a firm-level panel, we find evidence that an Indian judicial reform that increased banks' ability to recover nonperforming loans had such an adverse distributive impact.