A paper presented at the June 2000 conference quot;Specialization, Diversification, and the Structure of the Financial System: The Impact of Technological Change and Regulatory Reform,quot; sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York

During a crisis of confidence, announcements of deposit guarantees may give market participants short-term comfort. But stock market responses show that using public funds for bank bailouts is not a credible way to restore the health of the financial sector.The East Asian crisis began in...

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 represented a loss for commercial property amp; casualty insurers that was both unprecedented and unanticipated. After sustaining this record capital loss, the availability of adequate private insurance coverage against future terrorist attacks came...

This paper investigates the frequency of connections between banks and non-financial firms through board linkages and whether those connections affect lending and borrowing behavior. Although a board linkages may reduce the costs of information flows between the lender and borrower, a board...

This paper explores how organization and contract design has evolved to address regulatory challenges in risk management. In the early part of the century, futures exchanges responded to credit risks by developing clearing houses that act as guarantors. The liability structure of the clearing...

This paper synthesizes literature on the economics of regulation and positive political economy to provide a framework for understanding why certain types of banking and financial regulations arise in particular circumstance and what causes them to change. The analysis focuses on competition...

We document that ownership by officers and directors of publicly-traded firms is on average higher today than earlier in the century. Managerial ownership rises from 13 percent for the universe of exchange-listed corporations in 1935, the earliest year for which such data exist, to 21 percent in...

The following is a description of the paper, and not the actual abstract: This paper investigates empirically whether the internal organization of the firm can play an important role in affecting a firm's ability to commit to a particular quality of business practices and, if so, whether...

This paper investigates private interest, public interest, and political-institutional theories of regulatory change to analyze state-level deregulation of bank branching restrictions. Using a hazard model, we find that interest group factors related to the relative strength of potential winners...

This paper investigates empirically whether the internal organization of the firm can play an important role in affecting a firm's ability to commit to a particular quality of business practices and, if so, whether competition would be sufficient to lead firms to adopt that structure. In...