Contrary to public perception and previous literature on public bailout subsidies, we find over the recent 43-year period equityholders in big banks paid fairly for TBTF bailout insurance in terms of equity returns. In normal (non-crisis) periods, after TBTF in 1984, big banks pay an...

We study lottery behavior in banking stocks and use MAX/MIN to capture loss protection from bank bailout guarantees. We find that bank lottery preferences lead to lower short-term returns and that regulatory TARP assistance increases the likelihood of bank lotteryness and risk taking....