During the 1980s, U.S. commercial banks faced increased competition in their lending activity from large finance companies. This article analyzes the differential performance of banks and finance companies in various segments of the consumer and business credit markets. In particular, it...

This article summarizes some of the major themes and findings from the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Community Financial Access Pilot (CFAP), a two year effort designed to test and demonstrate effective, replicable, and sustainable approaches to expanding access to financial services and...

In 2009, the banking industry continued to feel the fallout from the financial crisis that began in mid-2007. Some good news was revealed in recently available first-quarter data, however, which showed profitability rebounding and increases in asset-quality problems slowing down. Whether...

The U.S. financial system has changed significantly over the last several decades without any major structural changes to the decentralized financial regulatory system, despite numerous proposals. In the past decade, many countries have chosen to consolidate their regulators into a newly formed...

This paper embeds two key ideas about the nature of financial innovation taken from the empirical literature into a familiar equilibrium monetary model. It provides formal support for several alternative econometric specifications for money demand that attempt to capture the effects of financial...

I examine the economic incentives behind the mutual fund trading scandal, which made headlines in late 2003 with news that several asset management companies had arranged to allow abusive--and, in some cases, illegal--trades in their mutual funds. Most of the gains from these trades went to the...