Conventional wisdom holds that the enactment of federal deposit insurance helped small rural banks at the expense of large urban institutions. This paper uses asymmetric information, agency-cost paradigms from corporate finance theory and data on bank stock prices to show how deposit insurance...

This paper tests the optimal-contracting hypothesis, drawing upon data from a natural experiment that ended during the Great Depression. The subjects of our experiment are bank stockholders. The experimental manipulation concerns the imposition of state or federal restrictions on the contracts...

Minimalist economists stubbornly resist Charles Kindleberger's characterization of investor expectations in a financial bubble as quot;irrational.quot; This paper seeks to resolve the controversy by imbedding Kindleberger's well-researched, impressionistic theory of financial crises into an...

Minimalist economists stubbornly resist Charles Kindleberger's characterization of investor expectations in a financial bubble as "irrational." This paper seeks to resolve the controversy by imbedding Kindleberger's well-researched, impressionistic theory of financial crises into an expanded,...

The Central Bank of Ireland and SUERF organised a joint conference in Dublin on 20th September, 2010 on the general theme of Regulation and Banking after the Crisis. In the best traditions of SUERF, the programme included papers and presentations from the three main constituencies of SUERF:...

This paper attributes evolution in regulatory regimes to market and political responses to changing opportunities for circumventing burdensome regulations. Principal-agent models predict that top government officials can and will use disinformation to build political support for regulatory...

Banks are in the business of taking calculated risks. Expanding the geographic footprint of an organization's profit-making activities changes the geographic pattern of its exposure to loss in ways that are hard for regulators and supervisors to observe. This paper tests and confirms the...

Federal regulators characterize capital forbearance as an efficient way of nursing weak banks and thrifts back to health. An alternative hypothesis is that forbearance reflects inefficient costs of agency that fall on federal deposit-insurance funds. Divergences between regulatory measures of a...

This paper explains that financial safety nets exist because of difficulties in enforcing contracts and shows that elements of deposit-insurance schemes differ substantially across countries. It argues that differences in the design of financial safety nets correlate significantly with...

Unlike the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation and the Bank Insurance Fund, the National Credit Union Share Insurance Fund (NCUSIF) entered the 1990s in a state of accounting solvency. This paper develops evidence to show the more important fact that NCUSIF remained solvent in a...