When supervisors have imperfect information about the soundness of banks, they may be unaware of insolvency problems that develop in the interval between on-site examinations. Supervising banks more often will alleviate this problem but will increase the costs of supervision. This paper analyzes...

Bank regulation in most countries encompasses a lender of last resort, deposit insurance and supervision. These functions are interrelated and therefore require coordination among the authorities responsible for them. These authorities, however, are often established with different mandates,...

We attempt to identify the consequence of the separation of inside ownership from control for firm performance. Exploiting the fact that banking institutions may hold their own shares in trust, we construct a clean measure of the wedge between inside voting control and cash flow rights. These...

This paper reviews the arguments as to whether the location of the securities unit in a banking conglomerate should be subject to regulation. This review is complemented with evidence on the regulations and on securities units' predominant location in the G--10 countries and in the United States...

This paper investigates the equity investments and voting rights that American banks control through their trust business. Following the evidence that German banks use the proxy voting rights they control to place their representatives on the firm's board of directors, the paper also studies...

The ubiquity of bank seniority is now a widely accepted fact in the academic literature. At the same time, trade creditors are sometimes granted a purchase money security interest in the materials or equipment they provide the firm. These two conflicting facts present a puzzle: Why would banks...

We show that efficiency is greater when financial institutions simultaneously offer different products, such as banking, insurance and investment banking (cross selling). Our results are based on the fact that offering multiple products improves the no-deviation constraints of the implicit...

When supervisors have imperfect information about the soundness of banks, they may be unaware of insolvency problems that develop in the interval between on-site examinations. Supervising banks more often will alleviate this problem but will increase the costs of supervision. This paper analyzes...