Corporate governance - and executive - compensation arrangements in particular - should be an important component of the agenda to reform the housing GSEs. The GSEs' safety-and-soundness regulator - who is essentially the debtholders' and taxpayers' representative - must be admitted to the GSEs'...

Most community banks face relatively high levels of diversifiable credit risk because they have relatively few loan customers (idiosyncratic risk) and are not geographically diversified (local market risk). We simulate mergers among community banks to quantify the relative contributions of...

Differences in college and post-graduate degree attainment alone explain less than half of Black-White and Hispanic-White wealth gaps in a standard wealth regression. Differences in family structure and measures of luck such as income windfalls and inheritances explain even less. Measures of...

From a public policy perspective, any reform of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in light of recent accounting revelations should include the crucial task of recalibrating managerial incentives to decrease the large risk appetite of the owners of two highly leveraged financial institutions that are...

We model side payments in a competitive credit-card market. If competitive retailers charge a single (higher) price to cover the cost of accepting cards, banks must subsidize convenience users to prevent them from defecting to merchants who do not accept cards. The side payment will be financed...