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...

With the passage of the Financial Modernization Act in 1999, the FDIC began reforming our system of federal deposit guarantees. Among the possibilities it has recently raised is a merger of its Bank Insurance Fund with its Savings Association Insurance Fund. This Economic Commentary explores...

A discussion of various proposals to allow the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to vary the cost of deposit insurance on the basis of risk.

Once Wal-Mart announced its intention to acquire an industrial loan company, a public furor arose that has brought a lot of attention to a type of institution that has existed for quite some time, but was not widely recognized outside of banking circles. What are ILCs and why have they become so...

Since 1990, when commercial banks were first eligible to join the Federal Home Loan Bank System, they have become an important constituency of the FHLBs. Currently, seven out of 10 banks are members, and nearly half of all banks have advances outstanding. Given the wide range of activities that...

We empirically test whether SBA-guaranteed lending has a greater impact on economic performance in markets with a high percentage of potential minority small businesses. This hypothesis is predicated on priors related to three overlapping assumptions. These three assumptions are: (1) The classic...

Recent advances in asset pricing-the reduced-form approach to pricing risky debt and derivatives-are used to quantitatively evaluate several proposals for mandatory bank issue of subordinated debt. The authors find that credit spreads on both fixed- and floating-rate subordinated debt provide...

This paper estimates the losses embedded in the capital positions of the 996 FSLIC-insured savings and loan institutions that did not meet capital standards at the end of the 1970s. We compare the estimated cost of resolving the insolvencies of these institutions at the end of the 1970s with the...

SBA guaranteed-lending programs are one of many government-sponsored market interventions aimed at promoting small business. The rationale for providing SBA loan guarantees is often based on the argument that they reduce credit rationing in low-income markets for small business loans. In this...