Unexpected increases in interest rates during the early 1980s and decreases in asset quality in the late 1980s caused massive losses throughout the savings and loan industry. Insolvency was common, if not the rule. But because of bureaucratic forbearance, funding constraints, and federal deposit...

Everyone recognizes the need to have a credible resolution regime in place for financial companies whose failure could harm the entire financial system, but people disagree about which regime is best. The emergence of the parallel banking system has led policymakers to reconsider the dividing...

One of the reforms proposed for preventing financial crises is to require financial institutions to hold more capital. There are a number of unresolved issues related to such a requirement, ranging from the costs of increased capital requirements to the best way to structure them. Some of this...

Predictions of firm-level credit spreads based on the current spot and forward credit spreads can be significantly improved upon by using the information contained in the shape of the credit-spread curve. However, the current credit-spread curve is not a sufficient statistic for predicting...

There is disagreement about whether large and complex financial institutions should be allowed to use U.S. bankruptcy law to reorganize when they get into financial difficulty. We look at the Lehman example for lessons about whether bankruptcy law might be a better alternative to bailouts or to...