Failure rates of small commercial banks during the banking crisis of the late 1980s were about 7.6%, which is significantly higher than the 5.7% failure rate during the recent crisis. We compare failure rates in the two periods using a statistical model that allows us to decompose the effect of...

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...

Two of the most significant banking reforms to come out of the banking problems in the late 1980s and early 1990s were the increase in capital requirements from Basel 1 and the prompt corrective action (PCA) provisions of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act of 1991...