The "market discipline" of off-balance sheet banking activities (OBSA) has been reexamined by employing contingent claims valuation techniques to derive implied asset variances from bank equity and deposit insurance, and from risk-premia for bank subordinated debt. Specifically implied asset...

This paper presents an analysis of the impact of ownership structure and regulation on the risk-taking behavior of commercial banks and savings and loans. Our work differs from previous efforts in that we measure risk in terms of an institution's asset or business risk, using the Ronn-Verma...

This paper investigates the impact of the Financial Services Modernization Act (FSMA) of 1999 on the insurance industry. We identify three events that have a differential impact across the business lines of the insurance industry. The overall impact of the FSMA across the business lines in the...

The Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 repeals the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act (1933) and the Bank Holding Company Act (1956) and allows insurance firms for the first time to merge with banks and cross sell non-traditional insurance products. Previous studies suggest that such an...

The usual advice given to the public by financial planners and the popular press is that less debt is better and in particular owning your own house outright is a desirable goal. We show that this advice is often wrong because mortgage debt acts as an inflation hedge. Mortgage debt also has a...

We examine the robustness of the Fama-French three-factor model in several bear and bull market periods. Data on bull and bear market periods are from the website of Global Financial Data. The data on the monthly returns of the 25 Fama French portfolios and the explanatory variablesmR, SMB, and...