We examine the optimal institutional allocation of bank regulation. We find that centralizing the lending of last resort and deposit insurance functions in a regulator leads to excessive forbearance. It also leads the bank to invest suboptimaly in loans. Giving this regulator supervision...

The advent of the euro has eroded many of the barriers that segmented the European corporate bond market along currency lines and given rise to a unified market comparable in size to the one denominated in US dollars. In doing so, the new currency has made it easier for investment banks to...

This paper reviews the theoretical literature on bank capital regulation and analyses some of the approaches to redesigning the 1988 Basel Accord on capital standards. The paper starts with a review of the literature on the design of the financial system and the existence of banks. It proceeds...

This paper looks at the advantages and disadvantages of mixing banking and commerce, using the quot;liquidityquot; approach to financial intermediation. Bringing a nonfinancial firm into a banking conglomerate may be advantageous because it may make it easier for the bank to dispose of assets...

This paper brings together two seemingly unrelated branches of the literature that focuses on different aspects of a bank's interaction with its borrowers: the relative priority of bank debt, and the role of banks as quot;relationship lendersquot;. Specifically, we show that bank seniority plays...

This paper analyzes the potential effects of commercial banks' expansion into the securities business, taking into account the underlying conditions assumed by the modern literature to explain the existence of financial intermediaries. The analysis focuses on the gains claimed to emerge with...

This paper investigates whether investors' domestic experience helps them enter foreign markets. We show that investors first invest in domestic securities and only some time later they invest in foreign securities. Our investigation of the length of time it takes investors to start investing in...

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...

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...

We test the predictions of several recent theories of how bank capital affects the rates that banks charge their borrowers. Consistent with previous studies, higher bank capital has a negative impact on loan rates, and this effect is focused on bank-dependent borrowers. Further investigation...