An examination of the risk effects of bank acquisitions that occurred between the first quarter of 1984 and the last quarter of 1993. Its findings -- that banks are not using acquisitions to increase their risk exposure and that acquisitions increase profitability over time -- cast doubt on the...

An examination of the decline in banking employment over the last decade, finding that technological changes explain the downturn only for large banks, and that acquisition accounts for very little of the overall employment shift.

An analysis of the limitations of the reduced-form empirical strategy as a method of testing the Modigliani-Miller model of corporate financial structure, demonstrating that an empirical strategy that is not closely tied to an underlying economic theory of behavior will usually yield estimates...

We investigate the welfare effects of inflation in economies with search frictions and menu costs. We first analyze an economy where there is no transaction demand for money balances: Money is a mere unit of account. We determine a condition under which strictly positive inflation is desirable....

While net settlement systems make more efficient use of liquidity than gross settlement systems, they are known to generate systemic risk. What does that tendency imply for the stability of the payments [or financial] system when the two settlement systems coexist? Do liquidity shortages induce...