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...

We investigate the sources of recent changes in the performance of U.S. banks using concepts and techniques borrowed from the cross-section efficiency literature. Our most striking result is that during 1991-1997, cost productivity worsened while profit productivity improved substantially,...

"<p> Franklin Allen, James McAndrews and Philip Strahan, October 2001<p> <p>Abstract: E-finance is defined as "The provision of financial services and markets using electronic communication and computation". In this paper we outline research issues related to e-finance that we believe set the stage for...</p></p></p>

Insurance is the only policy tool in the analyst’s repertoire that can reward individuals for taking loss reduction measures in advance of a disaster by giving them lower premiums while at the same time providing these same policyholders with compensation should they suffer losses from the...

Should lenders diversify, as suggested by the financial intermediation literature, or specialize, as suggested by the corporate finance literature? I model a financial institution's ("bank's") choice between these two strategies in a setting where bank failure is costly and loan monitoring adds...