To understand the 2008 financial crisis, Neil Fligstein looks to the business models of the big US banks. He shows how firms got hooked on mortgages--originating them, securitizing them, selling those securities, and even buying the same securities. In time their addiction nearly collapsed the...

We analyze link between mortgage-related regulatory penalties levied on banks and the level of systemic risk in the U.S. banking industry. We employ a frequency decomposition of volatility spillovers (connectedness) to assess system-wide risk transmission with short-, medium-, and long-term...