This paper studies the impact of technological change and regulatory competition on governmental efforts to generate rents for banks in two stylized regulatory environments. In the first environment, incentive-conflicted regulators attempt to create rents by restricting the size and scope of...

Banks are in the business of taking calculated risks. Expanding the geographic footprint of an organization's profit-making activities changes the geographic pattern of its exposure to loss in ways that are hard for regulators and supervisors to observe. This paper tests and confirms the...

Regulation consists of rulemaking and enforcement. Economic theory offers two complementary rationales for regulating financial institutions. Altruistic public-benefits theories treat rules as governmental instruments for increas- ing fairness and efficiency across society as a whole....

Financial safety nets are incomplete social contracts that assign responsibility to various economic sectors for preventing, detecting, and paying for potentially crippling losses at financial institutions. This paper uses the theories of incomplete contracts and sequential bargaining to...

After the 2008 Financial Meltdown the need to reconsider the separation between commercial banking and other financial risky activities - ring fencing - in order to mitigate systemic risks and to address the too big to fail problems was publicly recognized both in the United States and in...

We investigate the reasons that induce policymakers to assign banking supervision to central banks rather than involving authorities outside the banking sector. On the one hand, empirical results provide evidence that policymakers prefer that, conditional on several known features affecting...