Previous studies of the announcement effects of relaxing administrative and legislative restraints show that signal events leading up to the enactment of the Financial Services Modernization Act (FSMA) increased the prices of several classes of financial-institution stocks. An unsettled question...

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-à-vis regulators and other competitors. We...

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...

This paper supplies an agency-cost and contestable-markets perspective on the financial policies that triggered the Asian financial crisis. The agency-cost analysis hypothesizes that individual-country regulators knew that politically directed loans had made their banks insolvent, but...

This paper studies the impact of technological change and regulatory competition on governmental efforts to generate rents for banks in two stylized regulatory environments. In the first environment, incentive-conflicted regulators attempt to create rents by restricting the size and scope of...

Changes in political attitudes toward subsidizing mortgage loans and in technologies for transacting mortgage loans and for pooling and refinancing individual mortgage contracts threaten to remake the face of U.S. mortgage markets. This paper focuses on economic-efficiency benefits embodied in...

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...

Productlines of traditionally heterogeneous financial institutions are rapidly fusing into a homogeneous blend, institutions and market structures are reshaping themselves to lower the cost of serving customer demand for financial services.This paper contends that contemporary adaptations...

This paper focuses on microeconomic incentives set in motion by Federal Reserve decisions about how to implement the reserve-requirement and pricing-of-service provisions of the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980 (the DIDMC Act). These incentives promise to...