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 presents a theory of firm access to the bond market in which information gathering agencies are valuable but alter the relative cost of bond financing across firms and over the business cycle. The theory builds on the assumption that information frictions prevent these agencies from...

This paper uses duration analysis to investigate the timing of firms' decision to first access the public bond market. We find that, consistent with Diamond's (1991) model, reputation has a non-monotonic effect on the timing of firms' first public bond issue: firms with the highest and lowest...

Theory suggests that banks' private information about borrowers lets them hold up borrowers for higher interest rates. Since hold-up power increases with borrower risk, banks with exploitable information should be able to raise their rates in recessions by more than is justified by borrower risk...

The link between financial market concentration and stability is a topic of great interest to policymakers and other market participants. Are concentrated markets - those where a relatively small number of firms hold large market shares - inherently more prone to disruption? This article...

This paper investigates whether the bond market disciplines all banks equally in the sense of demanding the same relative risk premium across banks of different risk over time. To test this hypothesis the paper compares the difference between the credit spreads in the primary market of bank and...

The growth of the European financial markets, together with the new, stricter regulations on the U.S. financial system, has spurred a debate about the competitiveness of the U.S. financial markets. In this paper, we compare underwriting costs in the U.S. bond market and the Eurobond market over...

Modern corporate finance theory argues that although bank monitoring is beneficial to borrowers, it also allows banks banks to use the private information they gain through monitoring to quot;hold-upquot; borrowers for higher interest rates. In this paper, we seek empirical evidence for this...

Theory suggests that banks' private information about borrowers lets them hold up borrowers for higher interest rates. Since hold-up power increases with borrower risk, banks with exploitable information should be able to raise their rates in recessions by more than is justified by borrower risk...

This paper studies the effects of acquisitions on both acquired and acquiring banks. Through the use of overlap, von Mises, and other distance statistics, we confirm that, prior to acquisition, the acquirer generally performs better than the bank it acquired. Following the acquisition, the...