Motivated by the observation that very few banks fail in normal years, we explore the impact of that pattern on the precision of a standard statistical failure model and discuss implications for regulation and risk management. Out-of-sample forecasting is found to be worse for a model fitted to...

Motivated by prior results predicting contrasting linkages between industrial structure and economic stability, we present exploratory empirical evidence on this important issue. Consistent with the turnover hypothesis, we find that employment grew more steadily where business establishments in...

We apply the Bresnahan--Lau model (1982) to test the degree of competition of China's banking industry over the period 1986 to 2011. Results strongly reject monopoly power and indicate perfectly competitive behaviour. China's entry into the WTO did not cause any measurable shift in banking...

Structure-pricing linkages are estimated for single-market banks, to measure structure and pricing more accurately. Loan loss ratios are controlled for predicted to be important by information-theoretic models of lending. A strong structure-pricing linkage is found.

Previous literature has shown a strong association between the financial sector and economic growth, but theory predicts ambiguous associations between banking efficiency and size or market share. The relationships among efficiency ratios, absolute scale, and rank category are explored for a...

A compelling motivation for dividends remains elusive in the face of double taxation, yet firms continue to pay dividends. This note identifies two previously unrecognized benefits of dividends. First, positive dividends can finance investors preferred consumption streams under some conditions,...

Relaxing the common assumption of purely self-interested preferences in contests, it is shown that altruism (bilateral or unilateral) reduces equilibrium rent-seeking effort. The effects on net payoffs are more complex. Strategic interdependence is possible, but the symmetric equilibrium is pure...

Aggregate concentration may exacerbate systemic risk if the social cost of business failure is a superlinear function of the fraction of industry capacity lost to failure. This result suggests new empirical tests to inform policy debates, as well as supporting an efficiency rationale for...

The study tests whether removing bias can improve out-of-sample forecast accuracy in two series of interest rates. The samples are larger than previously studied in this context, and the test is cleaner since reported interest rates are never revised.