This paper provides a compact framework for banking regulation analysis in the presence of uncertainty between systemic liquidity and solvency shocks. It explains the asset price anomalies and bank lending freeze during the crisis. The paper shows how the coexistence of illiquidity and...

This paper develops a theoretical framework in which asset linkages in a syndicated loan agreement can infect a healthy bank when its partner bank fails. We investigate how capital constraints affect the choice of the healthy bank to takeover or liquidate the exposure held jointly with the...

The spectacular failure of the 150-year old investment bank Lehman Brothers on September 15th, 2008 was a major turning point in the global financial crisis that broke out in the summer 2007. Through the use of stock market data and Credit Default Swap (CDS) spreads, this paper examines the...

The belief that some banks are too big to fail (TBTF) became reality during the financial crisis of 2007-2009 when the biggest banks in the United States were bailed out. Since then, big banks have grown much bigger and have become increasingly complex. This development has led to far greater...

Bank failures began to rise in 2007 and more than 350 were closed by the end of 2011. A number of observers have asserted that the ability of banks to switch among competing supervisors was an important contributing factor, but the issue has not been carefully investigated in empirical work....

In this policy brief, we explain the fundamentals of risk-based capital (RBC) regulation and discuss some potential shortcomings of this system. We propose that the Fed end its use of RBC regulation and return to the use of simple capital ratios as measures of bank risk

In general, banks play a growth-enhancing role for the real economy. However, distorted incentives for banks, depositors, and regulators in connection with bank insolvency may corrupt banks' credit allocation and monitoring decisions, and may lead to suboptimal real economic outcomes. A...

Our concern in this article is two-fold: first to see whether the determinants of bank distress and failure have been any different in the GFC from previous years: second to see whether simple measures of capital adequacy outperform their risk-weighted counterparts as predictors, despite the...