The Federal Home Loan Bank (FHLB) System is a large, complex, and understudied government-sponsored liquidity facility that currently has more than $1 trillion in secured loans outstanding, mostly to commercial banks and thrifts. This paper first documents the significant role played by the FHLB...

This survey reviews the literature on the political economy of financial structure, broadly defined to include the size of capital markets and banking systems as well as the distribution of access to external finance across firms.The theoretical literature on the institutional basis for...

This paper deals with the relation between excessive risk taking and capital structure in banks. Examining a quarterly dataset of U.S. banks between 1993 and 2010, we find that equity is valued higher when more risky portfolios are chosen when leverage is high, and that more risk taking has a...

This paper proposes a new methodology to evaluate the economic effect of statespecific policy changes, using bank-branching deregulations in the U.S. as an example. The new method compares economic performance of contiguous counties on opposite sides of state borders, where on one side...

A growing body of literature indicates that competition increases bank soundness. Applying an industrial organization based approach to large data sets for European and U.S. banks, we offer new empirical evidence that efficiency plays a key role in the transmission from competition to soundness....

Using a unique dataset of the Euro area and the U.S. bank lending standards, we find that low (monetary policy) short-term interest rates soften standards, for household and corporate loans. This softening – especially for mortgages – is amplified by securitization activity, weak supervision...

This paper examines the quality of credit ratings assigned to banks in Europe and the United States by the three largest rating agencies over the past two decades. We interpret credit ratings as relative assessments of creditworthiness, and define a new ordinal metric of rating error based on...

Der Boom auf dem US-amerikanischen Eigenheimmarkt in den frühen 2000er Jahren führte zur schwersten Finanzkrise der vergangenen Jahrzehnte. Wissenschaftler haben unterschiedliche Faktoren dokumentiert, die zum rasanten Anstieg der Immobilienpreise beigetragen haben. Kaum beleuchtet wurde...

The current financial crisis has sparked intense debate about how weak banks should be resolved. Despite international efforts to coordinate and converge on such policies, national policy advice and resolution practices differ. The resolution methods adopted in the Nordic banking crises in the...

The US banking industry offers a unique, natural and fertile environment to study geography's effects on banks' behavior and performance. The literature on banks' operating performance, while extensive, says little about the influence of spatial interactions on banks' performance. We compute and...