Several trends in the financial industry could have weakened the competitiveness of small banks in recent years. Despite those challenges, small banks have grown more rapidly than larger banks over the period from 1985 to 2001, and their profitability has been sustained at high levels. However,...

In January 2006, federal regulators issued guidance requiring banks with specific high concentrations of commercial real estate (CRE) loans to tighten managerial controls. This paper shows that banks with concentrations in excess of the thresholds set in the guidance subsequently experienced...

The extraordinary government support for financial institutions during the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 heightened interest in how much the perception that governments will "bail out" the largest institutions affects their funding costs. However, it is hard to separate the effects on funding...

This paper examines how workers use 401(k) plans by examining their participation, contribution, and withdrawal decisions. Sixty-five percent of eligible workers participate in 401(k) plans. Employee participation rises with income, age, job tenure, and education. While participation also rises...

The recent financial crisis and the difficulty of using mainstream macroeconomic models to accurately monitor and assess systemic risk have stimulated new analyses of how we measure economic activity and the development of more sophisticated models in which the financial sector plays a greater...

Several authors have argued that inequality hinders growth by leading to high distorting taxes and transfers. We retest whether inequality and transfers are positively linked, using several alternative definitions and data sets including new income data assembled by the World Bank. We correct an...