Legislative and regulatory actions taken in response to the financial turmoil which occurred between 2007 and 2009 expanded the extent to which financial institution liabilities were protected by federal government guarantees: i.e., these actions expanded the federal financial safety net. How...

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...