Federal regulators characterize capital forbearance as an efficient way of nursing weak banks and thrifts back to health. An alternative hypothesis is that forbearance reflects inefficient costs of agency that fall on federal deposit-insurance funds. Divergences between regulatory measures of a...

This paper supplies an agency-cost and contestable-markets perspective on the financial policies that triggered the Asian financial crisis. The agency-cost analysis hypothesizes that individual-country regulators knew that politically directed loans had made their banks insolvent, but...

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...

Changes in political attitudes toward subsidizing mortgage loans and in technologies for transacting mortgage loans and for pooling and refinancing individual mortgage contracts threaten to remake the face of U.S. mortgage markets. This paper focuses on economic-efficiency benefits embodied in...

This paper studies the impact of broad changes in the economic and financial environment on the savings rate and portfolio composition of individuals in different age groups and household types. Employing survey data, household savings are cumulated as increases in net transactable wealth...

This paper studies competition among alternative regulatory bodies for authority over innovative financial contracts. In the United States, this rivalry embraces not only the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission, but state and federal...

Productlines of traditionally heterogeneous financial institutions are rapidly fusing into a homogeneous blend, institutions and market structures are reshaping themselves to lower the cost of serving customer demand for financial services.This paper contends that contemporary adaptations...

This paper focuses on microeconomic incentives set in motion by Federal Reserve decisions about how to implement the reserve-requirement and pricing-of-service provisions of the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980 (the DIDMC Act). These incentives promise to...

This paper assesses the probable impact on S&Ls' profitability and participation in mortgage markets of The Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980. It tracks inflation-induced secular declines in the value of S&L mortgage holdings between 1965 and 1979 and...

Controversies in term-structure theory center around the existence and variability of term premia in securities yields. In this paper, the term premium on a default-free n-period bond is defined as the difference between its observable yield to maturity and the average expected per-annum rate of...