The complex interactions, spillovers, and feedbacks of the global crisis that began in 2007 remind us of how important it is to improve our analysis and modeling of financial crises and sovereign risk. This review provides a broad framework to examine how vulnerabilities can build up and...

This review discusses the history of narrow banks, reform proposals involving narrow banks, and theory and empirical evidence regarding whether narrow banks should play a more prominent role in the financial system. Prior to the early-twentieth century, US banks tended to be much narrower than...

This review puts a corporate finance lens on microfinance. Microfinance aims to democratize global financial markets through new contracts, organizations, and technology. We explain the roles that government agencies and socially minded investors play in supporting the entry and expansion of...

Conventional discussions of balance sheet management by nonfinancial firms take the set of positive net present value (NPV) projects as given, which in turn determines the size of the assets of the firm. The focus is on the composition of equity and debt in funding such assets. In contrast, the...

The complex spillover effects between sectors observed during the global financial crisis and recent European crisis make clear the importance of improving our understanding of the interactions and feedback mechanisms between sovereign and banking-sector risks. To that end, this paper presents a...

Credit default swaps (CDSs) are term insurance contracts written on traded bonds. This review studies the economics of CDSs using the economics of insurance literature as a basis for analysis. It is alleged that trading in CDSs caused the 2007 credit crisis, and therefore trading CDSs is an evil...

This article analyzes the manifold situations in which the efficient-market hypothesis (EMH) has influenced—or has failed to influence—federal securities regulation and state corporate law, and the prospective roles for the EMH in these contexts. In federal securities regulation, the EMH has...

The first mortgage-backed security (MBS) was issued in 1968. Thereafter, the MBS market grew rapidly with outstanding issuances exceeding $9 trillion by 2010. The growth in the MBS market was accompanied by numerous innovations such as collateralized mortgage obligations (CMOs) and the emergence...

We identify the tension between dueling expectations of financial institutions as value-maximizing entities that also serve the public interest. We highlight the importance of information in addressing the public desire for banks to be safe yet innovative. Regulators can choose several...

In this review, we provide an economic assessment of the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 in terms of the likely efficacy of the financial-sector regulation it proposes. We focus in particular on its ability to contain systemic risk, the risk that many financial firms may fail en masse, and discuss the...