NBER Working Papers by Andrew Powell

In the early 1990s, after decades of high inflation and financial repression, Argentina embarked on a course of macroeconomic and bank regulatory reform. Bank regulatory policy promoted privatization, financial liberalization, and free entry, limited safety net support, and established a novel mix of regulatory and market discipline to ensure stable growth of the banking system during the liberalization process. Argentina suffered some fallout from the Mexican tequila crisis of 1995, but its response to that crisis (allowing weak banks to close) and the redoubling of regulatory efforts to promote market discipline after the crisis made Argentina's banking system quite resilient during the Asian, Russian, and Brazilian crises. Argentina's bank regulatory system now is widely regarded as ...

Following the Tequila period, its after-effects in Latin America and recent events in South East Asia, the effect of volatility on emerging market economies has become an important topic of research with the domestic financial intermediation process being advanced as one of the most important transmission mechanisms. At the same time there has been continued interest in issues related to imperfect information and rationing in credit markets. In this paper, we consider an economy where risk neutral banks provide intermediation services and risk neutral producers demand credit to finance their working capital needs. Our model blends costly state verification with imperfect enforcement power and, in this context of costly financial intermediation, we show that a weak legal system combined w...