Bank supervisors spend a great deal of resources collecting information on banks, information that would be useful to investors and other market participants. Given that duplicating these efforts is expensive, why not require bank supervisors to disclose this information? In this article, the...

This article documents the large changes in the size distribution and size dynamics of banks from 1960 to 2005. The authors find that neither the lognormal distribution nor the Pareto distribution fit the entire distribution, though they each do better with subsets of the distribution. Gibrat's...

Deterministic and stochastic auditing is introduced into a model of bank capital regulation. Low-capital banks are audited the most. Safe banks hold less capital than risky banks, so, counterintuitively, safe banks are audited more intensively than risky banks. The importance of auditing by...

A multi-agent, moral-hazard model of a bank operating under deposit insurance and limited liability is used to analyze the connection between compensation of bank employees (below CEO) and bank risk. Limited liability with deposit insurance is a force that distorts effort down. However, the need...

We document the effects of the recent financial crisis on the size distribution of U.S. commercial banks. There was a 14 percent drop in the number of banks from 2007 to 2013. Proportionally, the largest declines were to the smallest banks, those with less than $100 million in assets. This drop...