An investigation of the value of FSLIC forbearances to the stockholders of insolvent stock-chartered thrift institutions, concluding that these forbearances increase the stock-market value of thrift institutions.

An overview of an October 1993 conference that examined the costs, causes, and consequences of credit allocation by the federal government, covering both the broad rationale for government intervention in U.S. credit markets and a number of specific programs and regulations.

Increasingly, policymakers look to the small business sector as a potential engine of economic growth. Policies to promote small businesses include tax relief, direct subsidies, and indirect subsidies through government lending programs. Encouraging lending to small business is the primary...

This paper proposes an analytic framework for the reliability assessment of the automated payments systems used by the Federal Reserve Banks. The failure/recovery behavior of the system currently in operation is modeled as a continuous-time Markov process with varying levels of detail, and the...

Errors in recorded security prices are a source of misspecification in the market model. If recorded price errors are sufficiently nonrandom, they result in biased returns and in biased and inconsistent estimates of market model regression coefficients. This paper argues that tax-induced...

The guaranteed lending programs of the Small Business Administration (SBA) are large and growing rapidly. The SBA’s fiscal year 2008 performance budget calls for $25 billion in guaranteed loans for small businesses—a new record for the agency. Some critics of SBA programs suggest they do not...

Deregulation and financial consolidation have led to the development of financial holding companies—allowing commercial banking, insurance, investment banking, and other financial activities to be conducted under the same corporate umbrella—and the Federal Reserve has been named supervisor...

An examination of the continuing strength of the loan sales market, documenting its growth during the latter half of the 1980s, its subsequent downturn in the early 1990s, the effect of merger and acquisition activity, and the impact of the 1990-91 recession, plus a discussion of how these...

Federal deposit insurance protects the savings of small depositors, but it increases the likelihood that banks will take risks they otherwise would not have. Some bankers have suggested doubling the level of coverage to $200,000. While such an increase may put smaller banks on a par with larger...