Financial crises remain a recurring problem despite, or perhaps, as some suggest, because of, extensive innovation in capital markets over the past several decades. Crisis interventions are fraught with trade-offs: What are the costs of doing nothing? What is the probability that markets will...

Recent advances in asset pricing - the reduced form approach to pricing risk debt and derivatives - are used to quantitatively evaluate several proposals for mandatory bank issue of subordinated debt. We find that credit spreads on both fixed and floating rate subordinated debt provide...

Deregulation and financial consolidation have led to the development of financial holding companies - allowing commercial banking, insurance, investment banking, and other financial activities to be conducted under the same corporate umbrella - and the Federal Reserve has been named supervisor...

Recent advances in asset pricing - the reduced-form approach to pricing risky debt and derivatives - are used to quantitatively evaluate several proposals for mandatory bank issue of subordinated debt. We find that credit spreads on both fixed- and floating-rate subordinated debt provide...

One of the reforms proposed for preventing financial crises is to require financial institutions to hold more capital. There are a number of unresolved issues related to such a requirement, ranging from the costs of increased capital requirements to the best way to structure them. Some of this...