An investigation of one of the reasons why electronic payments have not yet supplanted cash and checks in retail transactions: Consumers willingness to use an innovation depends on the number of merchants who have already adopted it, and merchants willingness to invest in the innovation depends...

Do hedge funds help or hurt the financial markets in which they operate? The highly publicized troubles of Long Term Capital Management have once again focused the attention of policymakers and the press on the hedge fund industry and the cry for its regulation. This Economic Commentary refutes...

The increasingly controversial Exchange Stabilization Fund is used to influence the international value of the U.S. dollar and to provide aid to foreign countries. The debate surrounding the Fund will become more informed, the authors suggest, when observers understand how to calculate the total...

An analysis of the impact of depositor preference laws on the cost of debt capital for banks and on the value of FDIC deposit guarantees. The authors find that depositor preference laws increase the value of uninsured deposit claims and reduce the size of the FDIC subsidy, but will not affect...

An examination of the empirical impact of depositor preference legislation (DPL) on resolution type and resolution costs for commercial banks. It focuses on the impact of state DPL statutes, using FDIC and call-report data on resolution costs and types for all operating FDIC-BIF insured...

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the determinants of the leverage ratios (the book value of liabilities divided by the total of the book value of liabilities' and the market value of equity) for 232 bank holding companies for December 1986, June 1987, and December 1987. Many...

The impacts of deposit insurance and forbearance on the costs and value of uninsured deposits and equity capital are shown under three regimes.

An examination of the impact of increased capital requirements on bank portfolio behavior, finding that although the variance of earnings and the incentive to increase leverage are reduced with risk- and leverage-related interest rates, the impact of increased capital requirements on portfolio...

An analysis of the issues surrounding bank resolution costs, looking at failures from 1986 to 1992 and including proxies for fraud, off-balance-sheet risk, brokered deposits, and both regional and size effects. Evidence suggests there was a significant lag between the realization and recognition...

This paper examines two proposals to correct the risk-taking incentives embedded in the current deposit insurance system and to provide protection to the deposit insurance fund. the first would require banks to issue subordinated debt, and the second would require bank stockholders to post...