Since the Basle capital regulations of 1988 and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act (FDICIA) of 1991, capital requirements have been a critical part of bank regulation. These requirements limit leverage by requiring and encouraging banks to hold minimum levels of equity....

Economists regularly consider moral hazard when they analyze topics like insurance contracts, labor compensation, and financial regulation. The primer provided here describes moral hazard, its implications, and how to model it. The modeling strategy is to allow randomization in the contractual...

Surprisingly, 15 percent of U.S. households, most with low incomes, do not own a checking account. How do these people make and receive payments? Why don't they own checking accounts? These questions are answered using qualitative evidence from two focus group interviews plus quantitative...

The pre-commitment approach offers a novel way to improve bank capital regulation. It requires that banks choose their capital levels and that regulators fine them if losses exceed this level. In essence, the approach is a proposal to use menus of contracts, a device commonly employed in other...

Uncollateralized lending to jointly liable groups of individuals has proven to be a successful way of delivering credit to the poor in less-developed countries. Currently, such financial arrangements are being tried in the United States. The author develops a financial intermediation model in...

This paper studies bank capital regulation under deposit insurance when bank attributes and actions are private information. Banks are heterogenous in quality and choose both the mean and variance of their investment strategy. Regulatory tools include capital regulation and state-contingent...

The decentralized structure of the Federal Reserve System is evaluated as a mechanism for generating and processing new ideas on monetary and financial policy. The role of the Reserve Banks starting in the 1960s is emphasized. The introduction of monetarism in the 1960s, rational expectations in...

The decentralized structure of the Federal Reserve System is evaluated as a mechanism for generating and processing new ideas on monetary and financial policy. The role of the Reserve Banks starting in the 1960s is emphasized. The introduction of monetarism in the 1960s, rational expectations in...

This paper presents a tabletop exercise designed to analyze macroprudential policy. Several senior Federal Reserve officials were presented with a hypothetical economy as of 2020:Q2 in which commercial real estate and nonfinancial debt valuations were very high. After analyzing the economy and...

A multi-agent, moral-hazard model of a bank operating under deposit insurance and limited liability is used to analyze the connection between compensation of bank employees (below CEO) and bank risk. Limited liability with deposit insurance is a force that distorts effort down. However, the need...