[...]This article has two objectives: to examine theforces responsible for the declining role of traditionalbanking in the United States as well as in other countries,and to explore the implications of this decline and banks’responses to it for financial stability and regulatory policy.A key...

This paper reviews the achievements of the Labour Government’seducation policy between 1997 and 2001. Tony Blair claimed that hisGovernment would make education a priority. The first part of thepaper reviews the scale of education spending in relation to theeconomy at large and within the...

Liberalization and deregulation have recently accelerated.It is therefore useful to keep risk within a certain level inrelation to capital, considering that financial institutionsmust control their risk appropriately to maintain thesafety and soundness of their operation. In 1988, the...

In a model with heterogeneity in managerial talent, we compare the economicand political consequences of reforms aimed at reducing fixed costs of entry (deregulation)and improving the efficiency of financial markets (financial reform). Theeffects of these reforms depend on the market where...

[...]The most obvious possible, and undesirable,impact on bank behaviour of risk-weighted capital requirementsis that excessive differentials in the weights appliedto different categories of assets might induce banks to substituteaway from highly risk-weighted assets. In the early1990s, U.S....

Advocates of fair value accounting believe that fair valuesprovide more relevant measures of assets, liabilities, andearnings than do historical costs. These advocates assertthat fair value accounting better reflects underlying economicvalues. The advantages of this method—and thecorresponding...

Bank supervisors have long recognized two types of shortcomingsin the Basle Accord’s risk-based capital (RBC)framework. First, the regulatory measures of “capital” maynot represent a bank’s true capacity to absorb unexpectedlosses. Deficiencies in reported loan loss reserves, forexample,...

Traditionally, regulation of banks has focused on the riskentailed in bank loans. Loans are typically nontradedassets. In recent years, another component of bank assetshas become increasingly important: assets actively tradedin the financial markets.1 These assets form the “tradingbook” of a...

The purpose of this paper is to present a framework forincentive-compatible regulation that would enable regulatorsto ensure that riskier banks maintain higher capitalholdings.Under the precommitment approach, a bankannounces the appropriate level of capital that covers themaximum value of...

[...]This paper focuses on the relative emphasis thatthe structure of regulatory capital places on formulas andon supervision. The two are not viewed as mutually exclusive,but as elements to which capital policy implicitlyassigns relative weights. We will see that in U.S. regulatorypractice,...