We provide evidence that commercial banks extend their reputation in underwriting syndicated loans and private placements (private debt) to their bond underwriting activities. In the absence of bond-market reputation, private-debt-market reputation enables commercial banks to win underwriting...

Large U.S. banks dramatically increased their capitalization during the 1990s, to the highest levels in more than 50 years. We document this buildup of capital and evaluate several potential motivations. Our results support the hypothesis that regulatory innovations in the early 1990s weakened...

The literature provides conflicting assessments about how firms choose their capital structures, with the quot;tradeoffquot;, pecking order, and market timing hypotheses all receiving some empirical support. Distinguishing among these theories requires that we know whether firms have long-run...

We document the build-up of regulatory and market equity capital in large U.S. bank holding companies between 1986 and 2000. During this time, large banking firms raised their capital ratios to the highest levels in more than 50 years. Since 1995, essentially none of the 100 largest U.S. banking...

Implicit in the passage of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 is the premise that private market solutions to the conflict of interest problem associated with banks lending to and underwriting for the same firm are unavailable, thereby necessitating regulation. The recent deregulatory effort...