The financial crisis has led to a reconsideration of banks’ global business models. Using a dataset derived from the BIS banking statistics, this paper studies the geography of global banking. It distinguishes between “international” and “multinational” banks, their respective funding...

We build a bank-specific, fixed-effects regression model to develop proxies for a bank's monitoring effort. Our results show that banks that devote more resources to monitoring (based on these proxies) are more profit efficient and the effect is large. A very important theoretical literature in...

In this paper we develop an empirical two-stage model of price competition for the banking industry that incorporates the choice of capacity in the form of new branches. This is achieved by supplementing the customary two-equation framework (demand plus first-order condition in the loan market)...

The increasing complexity of large financial firms has led to consideration of alternative regulatory structures. This has intensified recently because of the worldwide turmoil in financial markets. One important consideration has been to increase reliance on market discipline—most notably,...

Risk-based capital adequacy requirements are the main tool employed by government regulators to assure bank stability. This approach allows banks to choose from a number of alternative methods for calculating the required capital. Many systems for measuring risk differ significantly in cost,...

In the second quarter of 2009, the FDIC imposed a special assessment on insured banks to replenish the deposit insurance fund. While the traditional assessment base for regular deposit insurance premiums was all insured deposits, the special assessment was applied to a bank's total assets minus...

This paper finds that banks that offered lower opening bids were rewarded with significantly lower warrant repurchase prices in transactions that raised $2.856 billion in 2009. These results were scaled by third-party consultants’ and the Congressional Oversight Panel's estimates of the...

We investigate the effectiveness of a well-known global regulatory agency, the Basel Committee, on a major sector of the US financial market. The Basel Committee's recommendations are implemented in the US following a plan set forth by the Federal Banking Agencies (FBAs). The information content...

The recent global financial crisis has highlighted the importance of the procyclicality of the financial sector. The procyclicality has transformed banks from mitigation mechanisms to amplifiers of changes in economic activity, potentially affecting financial stability and economic growth. The...

I investigate how commercial banks can use lending to attract underwriting business from loan clients. My empirical evidence indicates that rather than using less credit and higher spreads to punish firms that do not give them underwriting business (i.e., coercive tying), banks use more credit...