EU financial safety nets are social contracts that assign uncertain benefits and burdens to taxpayers in different member countries. To help national officials to assess their taxpayers' exposures to loss from partner countries, this paper develops a way to estimate how well markets and...

National safety nets are imbedded in country-specific regulatory cultures that encompass contradictory goals of nationalistic welfare maximization, merciful treatment of distressed institutions, and bureaucratic blame avoidance. Focusing on this goal conflict, this paper develops two hypotheses....

This paper studies the impact of broad changes in the economic and financial environment on the savings rate and portfolio composition of individuals in different age groups and household types. Employing survey data, household savings are cumulated as increases in net transactable wealth...

This paper studies competition among alternative regulatory bodies for authority over innovative financial contracts. In the United States, this rivalry embraces not only the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission, but state and federal...

This paper identifies factors that influence decisions about a country's financial safety net, using a comprehensive dataset covering 180 countries during the 1960-2003 period. Our analysis focuses on how private interest-group pressures, outside influences, and political-institutional factors...

Financial safety nets are incomplete social contracts that assign responsibility to various economic sectors for preventing, detecting, and paying for potentially crippling losses at financial institutions. This paper uses the theories of incomplete contracts and sequential bargaining to...

As financial institutions and markets transact more and more cross-border business, gaps and flaws in national safety nets become more consequential. Because citizens of host (home) countries may be made to pay for mistakes made in the home (host) country, Basel's lead-regulator paradigm...

Minimalist economists stubbornly resist Charles Kindleberger's characterization of investor expectations in a financial bubble as quot;irrational.quot; This paper seeks to resolve the controversy by imbedding Kindleberger's well-researched, impressionistic theory of financial crises into an...

Previous studies of event returns surrounding bank mergers show that banks gain value in megamergers and additional value when they absorb in-market competitors. A portion of these gains has been traced to the increased bargaining power of banks vis-agrave;-vis regulators and other competitors....

In a partial-equilibrium model, removing a binding constraint creates value. However, in general equilibrium, the stakes of other parties in maintaining the constraint must be examined. In financial deregulation, the fear is that expanding the scope and geographic reach of very large...