The authors analyze the effect of bank mergers on deposit interest rates, using data on banks responding to the Federal Reserve's Monthly Survey of Selected Deposits over an 11-year period. Their results suggest that banks exercise market power in pricing money market deposits and CD's in their...

Bank participation in derivative markets has risen sharply in recent years. The total amount of interest rate, currency, commodity, and equity contracts at U.S. commercial and savings banks soared from $6.8 trillion in 1990 to $11.9 trillion in 1993, an increase of 75 percent. A major concern...

In the present climate of intense debate over deposit insurance reform, the nature and limits of market discipline become especially important. The widely accepted argument for greater reliance on market discipline is that it will restrain managerial risk-taking and reduce potential losses to...

In recent years, risk management has been of growing interest to institutional investors, including pension funds, insurance companies, endowments, and foundations, as well as the asset management firms that manage funds on their behalf. Traditionally, institutional investors, and particularly...

Managing risk has always been an integral part of banking. In the past two years an approach to risk management called "Value at Risk" has been accepted by both practitioners and regulators as the "right" way to measure risk, becoming a de facto industry standard. Yet, the danger is that...

Modern finance would not have been possible without models. Increasingly complex quantitative models drive financial innovation and the growth of derivatives markets. Models are necessary to value financial instruments and to measure the risks of individual positions and portfolios. Yet when...

Loan syndication, where a group of banks makes a loan jointly to a single borrower, offers several benefits. Syndication allows banks to diversify, expanding their lending to broader geographic areas and industries. Second, syndication allows banks that are constrained by their capital-asset...

Derivatives are the fastest-growing financial instruments of our time. When used strategically, they can be very effective tools to mitigate risks. When used to speculate, that is, to bet on the inefficiency of financial markets, they can be trouble, especially if you are unaware that you are...

Mutual funds are now the preferred way for individual investors and many institutions to participate in capital markets, and their popularity has increased demand for evaluations of fund performance. Many business publications now rank mutual funds according to their performance, and information...

Swap contracts have grown tremendously in the last decade. Most are interest-rate swaps, the simplest being an exchange of one party’s fixed-rate interest payments for another’s floating-rate payments. Swaps can lower borrowing costs for both parties as well as provide a tool for managing...