In 2009, the National Endowment for Financial Education initiated a project to study the "Implications of a Quarter Century Research in Personal Finance." As part of that effort, one of the major themes chosen was to study the measurement and evaluation of participant outcomes. This paper is...

This paper reviews what economists have learned about Internet banking. The paper begins by surveying evidence regarding the fundamental motivations for banks to offer services via the Internet and for their customers to utilize the services. It considers the experience of and future prospects...

This policy brief evaluates the banking and policy implications of 2006 Congressional legislation authorizing the Federal Reserve to pay interest on reserves held at Federal Reserve banks beginning in October 2011. This upcoming policy change has received remarkably little attention from the...

Traditionally, individual states have shared responsibility for regulating the US insurance industry. The Dodd-Frank Act changes this by tasking the Federal Reserve with regulating the systemic risks that particularly large insurance organizations might pose and assigning the regulation of...

Following the onset of the August 2007 subprime mortgage crisis, bank regulators suggest that the old definition of bank may be too narrow – that banking has partially escaped their purview. Perhaps, but this may be partly the regulators’ own doing. We develop this proposition through...

This paper aims to test the extent to which the tax regulatory and market discipline hypotheses determine derivative activities of U.S. commercial banks for the period starting 1992 through 2008. We employ Mansfield’s (1961) logistic diffusion model and we consider derivative activities as...

The financial sector incurred big losses during the recent financial collapse and recession. The losses occurred despite regulatory requirements imposed upon the financial services industry meant to ensure confidence and stability. This study analyzes the profitability and stock returns of...

We test the predictability of investment fraud using a panel of mandatory disclosures filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). We show that past regulatory and legal violations, conflicts of interest, and monitoring have significant power to predict fraud. Avoiding the 5% of...