Essays on Financial Crises

Chapter 1 studies the relationship between income inequality and the occurrence of banking crises for 33 advanced countries between 1970-2011. Differently from other empirical studies, the focus of this study is on levels rather than growth rates of income inequality. A statistically significant and positive relationship is found between the value of the Gini index and the probability of banking crises. This result is confirmed when income distribution is summarized by the top 1% income share. Chapter 2 investigates whether macroprudential policies have been effective to address booms in in bank and household credit. Most of the previous empirical literature with cross-country data assess the effectiveness of macroprudential policies in curbing credit growth. However, in this study estimations are conducted with a binary dependent variable capturing credit booms. The results show that an aggregate index including five different macroprudential policy instruments is negatively and significantly associated with domestic bank credit booms. The results for aggregate indexes are robust to the inclusion of country and year fixed effects. Moreover, macroprudential policies are also found to be effective to reduce the likelihood of booms in household credit. Finally, this study shows that macroprudential policies are effective to address specifically those credit booms that are followed by systemic banking crises. Chapter 3 examines the impact of macroprudential policies on banks’ systemic risk in advanced and developing countries during the period 2000-2015. The main findings suggest that a tighter macroprudential policy stance in a country is negatively and significantly associated with the level of systemic risk for banks. Moreover, tighter conditions for concentration limits seem to reduce the growth rate of systemic risk. Finally, the results also show that tightenings of macroprudential policies were negatively associated with the growth rate of systemic risk for banks prior to the Global Financial Crisis.