The financial crisis provides a natural experiment for testing theoretical predictions of the equity underwriter's role following an initial public offering. Clients of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and Wachovia saw their stock prices fall almost 5 percent, on average, on the day...

In responding to the severity and broad scope of the financial crisis that began in 2007, the Federal Reserve has made aggressive use of both traditional monetary policy instruments and innovative tools in an effort to provide liquidity. In this paper, I examine the Fed's actions in light of the...

This paper shows that bank competition has an intrinsically ambiguous effect on capital accumulation and economic growth. We further demonstrate that banking market structure can be responsible for the emergence of development traps in economies that would otherwise be characterized by unique...

This paper examines the use of buybacks in Treasury cash and debt management. We review the mechanics and results of the buyback operations conducted in 2000-01, during a time of budget surpluses, and assess the prospective use of buybacks in the absence of a surplus. Possible future...

This paper shows that bank performance improves significantly after restrictions on bank expansion are lifted. We find that operating costs and loan losses decrease sharply after states permit statewide branching and, to a lesser extent, after states allow interstate banking. The improvements...

The effect of credit market competition on borrower default is theoretically ambiguous, because the quantity of credit supplied may rise or fall following an increase in competition. We investigate empirically the relationship between credit market competition, lending to households, and...

The moral hazard problem associated with deposit insurance generates the potential for excessive risk taking on the part of bank owners. The banking literature identifies franchise value a firm's profit-generating potential as one force mitigating that risk taking. We argue that in the presence...

Beginning in 1998, U.S. commercial banks may determine their regulatory capital requirements for financial market risk exposure using value-at-risk (VaR) models i.e., models of the time-varying distributions of portfolio returns. Currently, regulators have available three hypothesis-testing...

U.S. banks have substantial exposure to foreign markets such as Europe and Latin America. In this paper, we show how the amounts and forms of these exposures have evolved over time and note the changes in embodied risks taken through banks' cross-border activity, local claims, and derivative...

A deterioration in the link between the M2 monetary aggregate and GDP, along with large errors in predicting M2 growth, led the Board of Governors to downgrade the M2 aggregate as a reliable indicator of monetary policy in 1993. In this paper, we argue that the financial condition of depository...