Despite operating under substantial regulatory constraints, we find that commercial banks manage their investments largely consistent with the predictions of portfolio choice models with capital market imperfections. Based on 1990-2002 data for small (assets less than $1 billion) U.S. commercial...

We derive five hypotheses regarding market competition, price, and advertising from a theoretical model of a profit maximizing depository institution, and test these conjectures in a simultaneous system of deposit interest rates and advertising expenditures for a data panel of 1,867 thrift...

We offer a new explanation for why academic studies typically fail to find value creation in bank mergers. Our conjectures are predicated on the idea that, until recently, large bank acquisitions were a new phenomenon, with no best practices history to inform bank managers or market investors....

We assess the effects of geographic expansion on bank efficiency using cost and profit efficiency for over 7,000 U.S. banks, 1993-1998. We find that parent organizations exercise some control over the efficiency of their affiliates, although this control tends to dissipate with distance to the...

Noninterest income now accounts for over 40% of operating income in the U.S. commercial banking industry. This paper demonstrates a number of empirical links between bank noninterest income, business strategies, market conditions, technological change, and financial performance between 1989 and...

We construct a degree-of-total-leverage framework to test whether and how shifts in product mix affect earnings volatility at 472 U.S. commercial banks between 1988 and 1995. Our framework, which accounts for cost and revenue synergies not captured in most previous studies, conceptually links...

An important question for bank regulatory policy is whether supervisory examinations of large commercial banking firms - institutions that are already actively followed by many investors and their private sector agents - produce useful information that is not already reflected in market prices....

We test some predictions about the effects of technological progress on geographic expansion using data on banks in U.S. multibank holding companies over 1985-1998. Specifically, we test whether over time (a) parental control over affiliate banks has increased, and (b) the agency costs...

We study recent changes in the geographic distances between small businesses and their bank lenders, using a large random sample of loans guaranteed by the Small Business Administration. Consistent with extant research, we find that small borrower-lender distances generally increased between...

We develop a theoretical model of decision-making under risk and uncertainty in which bank lenders have both imperfect information about loan applications and imperfect ability to make decisions based on that information. We test the loan-default implications of the model for a large random...