Bank bailouts in the aftermath of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the onset of the Great Recession brought into sharp relief the power that the global financial sector holds over national politics, and provoked widespread public outrage. In The Power of Inaction, Cornelia Woll details the...

This paper examines the impact of charter type, holding company structure, and measures of bank fragility on the likelihood of a bank bailout or failure during the late 2000s financial crisis. The empirical results indicate that established institutions were more likely to fail if they were...

The 2008 financial crisis was the second instance since the Great Depression that many hundreds of financial institutions failed across the United States. The rescue staged by the federal government, however, was unprecedented in scale, involving an initial Congressional authorization of $700...