What the future holds for securities markets is of course a remarkably broad question, and undoubtedly designed by the conference organizers to be so. In order to keep from lapsing into free association, therefore, I will take the issue of technology and its implications for the future of...

This chapter summarizes a multi-year research effort to understand the role of process performance in the overall efficiency of banks. By focusing on the process as the unit of analysis, the authors consider how technology, human resources, and most importantly, the interaction between these...

The Internet has had a profound effect on the financial service sector, dramatically changing the cost and capabilities for marketing, distributing and servicing financial products and enabling new types of products and services to be developed. This is especially true for retail financial...

This paper examines the reallocation of bank credit from loans to securities in the early 1990s using data on virtually all U.S. banks from 1979 to 1992. The spectacular increase in bank and thrift failures in the 1980s raised concerns about depository institution risk and spurred interest in...

A series of news articles in the summer and fall of 1993 reported excessive managerial compensation and stock option packages at some large state-approved thrift mutual-to-stock conversions. Congress reacted to these reports and the House Banking Committee introduced legislation late in 1993...

This paper examines the role of reinsurance relationships in the trading of underwriting risk when this trade takes place in an environment that is characterized by asymmetric information and in which information is revealed only over time. It begins by explaining how information problems affect...

Private sector pension plans have undergone substantial change in form and structure in the United States over the last two decades. This paper explores and evaluates these changes using information on pension plan characteristics gathered by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) since 1980 in...