Search Results
Journal Article
The housing giants in plain view
These government-sponsored enterprises continue to make headlines because of their explosive growth and resulting heavyweight status within the nation's financial system.
Journal Article
Rules vs. discretion: the wrong choice could open the floodgates
Anyone who sets any kind of policy can appreciate the dilemma that faces those trying to prevent construction in floodplains: Is it better to stick to the rules-no matter how harsh-or to exercise discretion under certain circumstances?
Journal Article
Jumbo CDs play tiny role in policing risky banks ... so far
Reforms enacted after the S&L crisis have yet to persuade holders of jumbo CDs to monitor their banks' risky practices.
Journal Article
Is federal home loan bank funding a risky business for the FDIC?
Easy access to FHLB funds has helped community banks stay afloat in today's competitive markets, but could pose a risk to the FDIC's insurance fund.
Working Paper
Can feedback from the jumbo-CD market improve bank surveillance?
We examine the value of jumbo certificate-of-deposit (CD) signals in bank surveillance. To do so, we first construct proxies for default premiums and deposit runoffs and then rank banks based on these risk proxies. Next, we rank banks based on the output of a logit model typical of the econometric models used in off-site surveillance. Finally, we compare jumbo-CD rankings and surveillance-model rankings as tools for predicting financial distress. Our comparisons include eight out-of-sample test windows during the 1990s. We find that rankings obtained from jumbo-CD data would not have improved ...
Journal Article
Deposit insurance reform
In the cover story, find out why some bankers are encouraging Congress to raise the ceiling for insurance on deposits to $130,000 from $100,000 per account. Opponents point out that in the wake of the last increase, the S&L crisis occurred.
Working Paper
Dividends, stock repurchases and signaling: evidence from U.S. panel data
This paper exploits yearly accounting data from 1977 to 1994 to test the relative signaling power of dividends and net stock repurchases. The specification controls for potential agency cost and asset dissipation effects. Specifically, we regress changes in future income before extraordinary items on changes in dividends, changes in net stock repurchases, and a host of control variables. We also split the sample at 1981 to measure the impact of changes in the relative taxation of distribution methods. For the full twenty-year sample, only dividend changes are correlated with changes in future ...
Journal Article
Navigating the brave new world of bank liquidity
By traditional measures, liquidity risk for banks is higher today than 10 years ago. But new measures-necessitated by new funding sources-tell another story.
Working Paper
The role of a CAMEL downgrade model in bank surveillance
This article examines the potential contribution to bank supervision of a model designed to predict which banks will have their supervisory ratings downgraded in future periods. Bank supervisors rely on various tools of off-site surveillance to track the condition of banks under their jurisdiction between on-site examinations, including econometric models. One of the models that the Federal Reserve System uses for surveillance was estimated to predict bank failures. Because bank failures have been so rare during the last decade, the coefficients on this model have been "frozen" since 1991. ...