We examine how a change in statutory accounting rules that reduces U.S. life insurers’ regulatory capital leads them to manage their capital, as well as real effects of this management in the insurance product market. Effective at the end of 2009, Actuarial Guideline 43 (AG 43) increases...

In the wake of the financial crisis, policymakers expressed the concern that banks’ use of the incurred loss model exacerbates their lending procyclicality by delaying the recognition of loan losses to recessions. Responding to this concern, the FASB issued Accounting Standards Update 2016-13,...

As of November 2016, SEC Regulation (“Reg”) AB II requires issuers of certain types of asset-backed securities (“ABS”) to disclose the credit-risk attributes of each asset in the underlying pool, a substantial expansion of prior disclosure requirements. We examine how ABS issuers’...

We provide evidence that banks classify securities as held to maturity (HTM) rather than available for sale (AFS) when HTM classification provides preferred financial accounting and regulatory capital treatments, not because they have a distinct economically motivated intent and ability to hold...

Starting in March 2023, depositor runs quickly led to the failures of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), Signature Bank, and First Republic Bank. In the wake of higher interest rates, uninsured depositors of these banks had lost confidence in their business model of taking in deposits and investing the...

I discuss Desai, Rajgopal, and Yu (2015) with the goal of helping readers think carefully about which implications of the study are likely to generalize to future economic downturns and which are likely to be specific to the facts and circumstances of the recent financial crisis, given that the...