To the extent raising external capital is especially costly for banks (as the preceding article suggests), bank managers have incentives to manage their internal cash flow in ways that minimize their need to raise external equity. One way to accomplish this is to establish bank holding companies...

In 1993, Bank of America's Risk and Capital Analysis Group was charged with the task of developing and instituting a single corporate-wide system to allocate capital to all the bank's activities. Since 1994, that system has been providing quarterly reports of risk-adjusted returns on capital...

Bankers appear to play a special role in providing commitment-based financing to corporations. This type of lending is important not only for small firms that lack access to public debt markets but for large and medium-size companies as well. For such companies, commitment-based financing...