The link between financial market concentration and stability is a topic of great interest to policymakers and other market participants. Are concentrated markets - those where a relatively small number of firms hold large market shares - inherently more prone to disruption? This article...

Over most of the last thirty-three years, the Federal Reserve has polled a small number of bank loan officers about their moves to tighten or ease commercial credit standards. Although the Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey uses a small sample and gathers only qualitative information, it proves...

A paper summarizing the proceedings of quot;Beyond Pillar 3 in International Banking Regulation: Disclosure and Market Discipline of Financial Firms,quot; an October 2003 conference cosponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Jerome A. Chazen Institute of International Business...

There is strong evidence that the interest rates charged by banks on the flow of newly extended Commercial amp; Industrial (Camp;I) loans predict future loan performance and CAMEL rating downgrades by bank supervisors. While internal risk ratings have little explanatory power for future loan...

Following the investment-cash flow literature, we test whether bank lending is constrained by the availability of insured deposits--a necessary condition for the existence of a bank lending channel of monetary policy. We treat insured deposits as a type of quot;internal fund,quot; similar to...

Banks are regulated more than most firms, making them good subjects to study regulatory arbitrage (avoidance). Their latest arbitrage opportunity may be the new leverage rule covering the largest U.S. banks; leverage rules require equal capital against assets with unequal risks, so banks can...

We investigate how the better integration of U.S. banks across states has affected economic volatility within states. In theory, the link between bank integration and volatility is ambiguous; integration tends to dampen the impact of bank capital shocks on state activity, but it amplifies the...

Theory suggests that bank integration (financial integration generally) can magnify or dampen the business cycles, depending on the importance of shocks to firm collateral versus shocks to the banking sector. In this paper, we show empirically that bank integration across U.S. states over the...