This paper looks at the role of both commercial and investment banks in providing merger advisory services. In this area, unlike some areas of investment banking, commercial banks have always been allowed to compete directly with investment banks. In their dual role as lenders and advisors to...

Persistent cycles of devaluation, debt repudiation, and financial crisis have been recurrent themes in Latin America and elsewhere. This study focuses on one such event, namely, the Mexican peso devaluation, debt, and financial-sector crisis of 1994-95. This paper utilizes an event-study...

This paper tests the hypothesis that changes to the "too-big-to-fail" (TBTF) doctrine under the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act of 1991 (FDICIA) increased the risk of deposit loss and the cost of funds for large banks. Furthermore, the paper analyzes the implications of the...

We show that concentrating bank regulation on bank capital ratios may be ineffective in controlling risk taking. We propose, instead, a more direct mechanism of influencing bank risk-taking incentives, in which the FDIC insurance premium scheme incorporates incentive features of top-management...

This paper uses a unique database to test the effect of ATM surcharges on larger versus smaller banks. Only nonbank ("foreign") users of ATMs pay ATM surcharges. Customers thus face incentives to switch accounts from smaller banks to larger banks in order to avoid high ATM surcharges. We find...

In 1933 and 1956, the United States sharply limited the kinds of securities, commercial, and insurance activities banks could engage in. These regulations remain in place despite profound changes in the economic environment, in the structure of the national and international financial markets,...