This policy brief examines issues associated with the design and implementation of regulatory policymaking in interconnected financial markets. The policy brief explains why international interdependence among nations' financial markets and regulations can provide an incentive for national...

This paper utilizes a profit maximizing banking model to analyze sweeping behavior. Comparative statics results indicate that sweeping responds positively to increases in bank loan rates and reserve ratios and negatively to increases in the interest rate on reserves or to exogenous increases in...

This policy brief evaluates the banking and policy implications of 2006 Congressional legislation authorizing the Federal Reserve to pay interest on reserves held at Federal Reserve banks beginning in October 2011. This upcoming policy change has received remarkably little attention from the...

This policy brief assesses the implications of Basel II for bank regulatory compliance costs. In spite of widespread complaints by bankers about the costs of complying with Basel II rules, the academic literature has given surprisingly little attention to quantifying these costs. The brief...

Building on the literature emphasizing banks' monitoring functions, recent contributions to the literature examining the effects of capital regulation have focused attention on the influences of capital requirements on bank incentives to monitor loans for moral hazard risks. Empirical evidence...

This paper reviews academic studies of bank capital regulation in an effort to evaluate the intellectual foundation for the imposition of the Basel I and Basel II systems of risk-based capital requirements. The theoretical literature yields general agreement about the immediate effects of...

In this paper we develop a model of the banking firm that enables us to test for portfolio separation. Our theoretical model generalizes existing intertemporal adjustment-cost models by assuming that these costs coexist simultaneously on both sides of the bank's balance sheet. The optimal...

This paper uses a three-region framework to examine the effects of European currency unification on EMU and US inflation rates. It considers ways in which increased participation in the EMU might influence inflation choices in Europe and the United States. It also considers how alternative...

The application of U.S. antitrust policy toward mergers in the banking industry is based on past research suggesting that there is a trade-off between adverse effects on consumer welfare owing to potentially augmented market power and possible welfare-improving effects arising from efficiency...

This policy brief reviews recent studies that have sought to apply analysis of network externalities and the theory of two-sided markets to card payment networks, and it evaluates the public policy implications of this body of work. Three general conclusions emerge from the bulk of the research...