Much attention has been paid to the large decreases in value of non-agency residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) during the financial crisis. Many observers have argued that the fall in prices was partly driven by decreased liquidity and fire sales. We investigate whether capital...

The 1964 Securities Acts Amendments extended the mandatory disclosure requirements that had applied to listed firms since 1934 to large firms traded Over-the-Counter (OTC). We find several pieces of evidence indicating that investors valued these disclosure requirements, two of which are...

We develop a new identification strategy to evaluate the impact of the geographic expansion of bank holding company (BHC) assets across U.S. metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) on BHC risk. We find that the geographic expansion of bank assets reduces risk. Moreover, geographic expansion...

Did regulatory reforms that lowered barriers to competition among U.S. banks increase or decrease the quality of information that banks disclose to the public and regulators? We find that an intensification of competition reduced abnormal accruals of loan loss provisions and the frequency with...

We develop a model of the market for federal funds that explicitly accounts for its two distinctive features: banks have to search for a suitable counterparty, and once they meet, both parties negotiate the size of the loan and the repayment. The theory is used to answer a number of positive and...

Macroprudential stress tests have been employed by regulators in the United States and Europe to assess and address the solvency condition of financial firms in adverse macroeconomic scenarios. We provide a test of these stress tests by comparing their risk assessments and outcomes to those from...

This paper traces career transitions of federal and state U.S. banking regulators from a large sample of publicly available curricula vitae, and provides basic facts on worker flows between the regulatory and private sector resulting from the revolving door. We find strong countercyclical net...

An integrated tax and transfer system together with factor mobility can help mitigate local shocks within monetary and fiscal unions. In this paper we explore the role of a new mechanism that may also be central to determining the welfare effects of regional shocks. The degree to which...

In this paper and the associated online database, we provide new data and measures of bank regulatory and supervisory policies in 180 countries from 1999 to 2011. The data include and the measures are based upon responses to hundreds of questions, including information on permissible bank...

In spite of mounting losses banks continued to pay dividends during the crisis. We present a model that addresses this behavior. By paying out dividends, a bank transfers value to its shareholders away from creditors, among whom are other banks. This way, one bank's dividend payout policy...