A fixed-rate deposit insurance system provides a moral hazard for excessive risk taking and is not viable absent regulation. Although the deposit insurance system appears to have worked remarkably well over most of its 50-year history, major problems began to appear in the early 1980s. This...

Previous studies of event returns surrounding bank mergers show that banks gain value in megamergers and additional value when they absorb in-market competitors. A portion of these gains has been traced to the increased bargaining power of banks vis-à-vis regulators and other competitors. We...

Over the past decade, the banking industry has undergone rapid consolidation; indeed, on average, for the past three years there were more than two bank mergers every business day. Before the 1990s, most bank mergers involved banks with less than $1 billion in assets; more recently, even the...

This paper analyzes the causes and consequences of offshore financial centers (OFCs). Since OFCs are likely to be tax havens and money launderers, they encourage bad behavior in source countries. Nevertheless, OFCs may also have unintended positive consequences for their neighbors, since they...

We develop new techniques to assess the relationship between commercial bank performance and the economic conditions in the markets in which they operate. In the analysis, we allow for heterogeneity in the responses of banks to regional economic conditions. We find a statistically significant...

In 1986, a task force of banking academics organized and sponsored by the American Bankers Association convened to examine the banking industry and the efficacy of its regulatory system. The group was charged with reviewing the problems of ensuring the safety and soundness of the banking system...

We examine foreign intermediation activity in Japan during the so-called "lost decade" of the 1990s, contrasting the behavior of lending by foreign commercial banks and underwriting activity by foreign investment banks over that period. Foreign bank lending is shown to be sensitive to domestic...

We examine a concerted debt reduction deal between a sovereign debtor, a private creditor, and an official creditor, who insures the deposits of the commercial bank. Our results show that a weakening of the financial position of the commercial bank reduces the contribution of the commercial bank...

The case for an independent central bank is becoming increasingly accepted. This new orthodoxy is based on three foundations: the success of the Bundesbank and the German economy over the past forty years; the theoretical academic literature on the inflationary bias of discretionary...