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Working Paper
Banker Compensation, Relative Performance, and Bank Risk
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 to increase compensation to risk-averse employees in order to compensate them for extra bank risk is a force that reduces this effect. Optimal contracts use relative performance and are implementable as a wage with bonuses tied to individual and firm performance. The connection between pay for ...
Report
Living Wills: A Tool for Curbing 'Too Big to Fail'
Economist Arantxa Jarque and senior editor David A. Price explore an innovation of the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, which requires the largest and most complex financial institutions to create resolution plans to follow if the institutions fall into severe financial distress. In these plans, or "living wills," the institutions must give regulators a roadmap for resolving them via the bankruptcy process ? without disrupting the financial system or resorting to public bailouts. Jarque and Price argue that living wills are a tool that regulators can use to curb the "too big to fail" problem ...
Briefing
Measuring CEO Compensation
Compensation packages for CEOs of large public companies often include grants of restricted stock and stock options, the value of which to the CEO depends on the future performance of the firm, as well as on the terms of the grants. This value, which is key to evaluating the CEO's incentives, can be estimated in a number of ways. The authors use measures based on the expected values and the realized values of pay to compare the compensation of CEOs in a sample of large public U.S. firms and a subset of financial firms before and after the 2007-08 financial crisis.
Briefing
Assessing Large Financial Firm Resolvability
A large financial institution may be said to be "resolvable" if, in the event of failure, policymakers would allow it to go through bankruptcy without financial assistance from the government. The choice between bankruptcy or bailout trades off different sets of costs on the economy. This Economic Brief presents a new tool that could assist policymakers with this evaluation, potentially helping to curb the "too big to fail" problem, serving as a useful complement to the "living wills" process, and making the resolution process more transparent.
Briefing
Living Wills for Systemically Important Financial Institutions: Some Expected Benefits and Challenges
The Dodd-Frank Act requires systemically important financial institutions to create resolution plans, or living wills, that bankruptcy courts can follow if these institutions fall into severe financial distress. The plans must set out a path for resolution without public bailouts and with minimal disruption to the financial system. While living wills can, in this way, help to curb the "too big to fail" problem, regulators face a number of challenges in achieving this goal. The authority granted to regulators by the Act, including the power to make systemically important institutions change ...
Briefing
Bank Lending in the Time of COVID
We discuss the evolution of bank lending during the first several months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Large domestic banks and foreign-related banks increased significantly their lending to businesses during these months, much of it through existing lines of credit. Small domestic banks played an active role in providing paycheck protection loans. In terms of consumer credit, the stock of banks' residential mortgage loans did not change substantially, and the amount of bank credit flowing directly to consumers decreased.
Briefing
Bank Resolution and the Fed’s New Standing Repo Facility
In July 2021, the Fed put a new lending program in place: the Standing Repo Facility. The program will likely impact the financial system in multiple ways. One specific area of influence is the process of resolution planning at large banking corporations. How the facility interacts with those plans will depend in part on guidance provided by regulators as resolution planning continues evolving.
Journal Article
Regulation and the composition of CEO pay
A look at the recent trends in the use of grants of restricted stocks and options in the compensation packages of chief executive officers (CEOs) of large, public U.S. companies reveals that there have been important changes. These changes coincide with the introduction of two new regulations: the modifications of reporting requirements for option grants introduced by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002, and the adoption in 2006 of revised accounting standards from the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) included in statement no. 123R (FAS 123R), which mandated the expensing of option ...
Journal Article
Evaluating Executive Compensation Packages
The first step in understanding the incentives provided to chief executive officers (CEOs) of large public firms is to measure their compensation accurately. This is not a straightforward task, as only partial information on compensation contracts is collected systematically (Execucomp, since 1992, for top executives of public U.S. firms). The source for the information is the compensation summary tables that the Securities and Exchange Commission mandates to be included in annual proxy statements. We show how to use this available data, together with stock price data in the Center for ...
Journal Article
Living Wills: A Tool for Curbing Too Big to Fail
Economist Arantxa Jarque and senior editor David A. Price explore an innovation of the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, which requires the largest and most complex financial institutions to create resolution plans to follow if the institutions fall into severe financial distress. In these plans, or "living wills," the institutions must give regulators a roadmap for resolving them via the bankruptcy process -- without disrupting the financial system or resorting to public bailouts. Jarque and Price argue that living wills are a tool that regulators can use to curb the "too big to fail" problem ...