We study bank supervision by combining a theoretical model that distinguishes supervision from regulation and a novel dataset on work hours of Federal Reserve supervisors. We highlight the trade-offs between the benefits and costs of supervision and use the model to interpret the relationship...

We measure bank supervision using the database of supervisory issues, known as matters requiring attention or immediate attention, raised by Federal Reserve examiners to banking organizations. The volume of supervisory issues increases with banks' asset size, especially for the largest and most...

The policy measures taken since the financial crisis have greatly expanded the size of the Federal Reserve's balance sheet and have thus raised the level of aggregate bank reserves as well. Over the same period there has been a significant shift in the timing of payments made over the Federal...

Since the end of the Great Recession, growth in health care spending has declined to historically low levels. There is disagreement over whether this decline was caused by falling incomes during the Great Recession (and therefore is likely to reverse once the recovery is complete) or whether the...

In 2002, the Securities and Exchange Commission mandated that the chief executive officers of large, publicly traded firms certify the accuracy of their company financial statements. In this paper, I investigate whether CEO certification has had a measurable effect on the stock market valuation...

Despite recent innovations that might have reduced banks' reliance on brick-and-mortar branches for distributing retail financial services, the number of U.S. bank branches has continued to increase steadily over time. Further, an increasing percentage of these branches are held by banks with...

I present evidence that the cross-guarantee authority granted to the FDIC by the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act of 1989 has unexpectedly strengthened the Federal Reserve's source-of-strength doctrine. In particular, I find that a bank affiliated with a multi-bank...

We study the role of commitment in a version of the Diamond and Dybvig (JPE, 1983) model with no aggregate uncertainty. As is well known, the banking authority can eliminate the possibility of a bank run by committing to suspend payments to depositors if a run were to start. We show, however,...

In moral hazard models, bank shareholders have incentives to transfer wealth from the deposit insurer - that is, maximize put option value - by pursuing riskier strategies. For safe banks with large charter value, however, the risk-taking incentive is outweighed by the possibility of losing...

Although bank capital regulation permits a bank to choose freely between equity and subordinated debt to meet capital requirements, lenders and investors view debt and equity as imperfect substitutes. It follows that the mix of debt in regulatory capital should isolate the role that the market...