An investigation of the impact of U.S. and German central-bank interventions on the forward discount puzzle for two exchange rates-the German mark/U.S. dollar and the Japanese yen/U.S. dollar-using official 1985-91 data. The evidence on the importance of intervention is strongest for the DM/$....

A comparison of official data on U.S. foreign exchange intervention with newspaper reports, finding that the series are systematically different and implying either that intervention may not be able to signal monetary policy accurately or that not all market participants have equally accurate...

In light of research questioning the usefulness of economists' models of exchange-rate determination, this paper investigates the rationality of survey measures of expectations for Deutschmark/dollar exchange rates for 1989-97. Using Liu and Maddala's (1992) "restricted cointegration" test, the...

A study of the impact of capital requirements on bank portfolio decisions, showing that the variance of earnings and the incentive to increase leverage are reduced with risk- and leverage-related deposit rates, and that the impact of increased capital requirements on portfolio behavior is...

Under depositor-preference laws, depositors' claims on the assets of failed depository institutions are senior to unsecured general-creditor claims. As a result, depositor preference changes the capital structure of banks and thrifts, thereby affecting the cost of capital for depositories....

Banking consolidation, spurred by interstate branching deregulation, is changing markets' competitive structure. Policymakers and regulators have focused on the implications for customers in retail and wholesale markets rather than consolidation's impact on correspondent banking markets (where...

An assessment of how banks adjust to increased capital requirements, illustrated by a model of a bank's choice of optimal leverage.

A test of whether the anticipation of G-3 (Germany, Japan and the U.S.) central-bank intervention explains wider bid-ask spreads in the spot and forward rates of marks/dollars and yen/dollars, finding little evidence to support the view that spreads widen in anticipation of intervention.

Using an explicit model for subordinated debt that considers the possibility of FDIC forbearances, the authors show that forbearance 1) alters the required rate of return on subordinated debt while increasing its market value and 2) weakens the effectiveness of such debt as a source of market...