Search Results
Working Paper
Banking and commerce: a liquidity approach
This paper looks at the advantages and disadvantages of mixing banking and commerce, using the "liquidity" approach to financial intermediation. Adding a commercial firm makes it easier for a bank to dispose of assets seized in a loan default. This "internal market" increases the liquidity of such assets and improves the bank's ability to perform financial intermediation. More generally, owning a commercial firm may act either as a substitute or a complement to commercial lending. In some cases, a bank will voluntarily refrain from making loans, choosing to become a nonbank bank in an ...
Journal Article
Recent trends in the profitability of credit card banks
Competition among credit card issuers has increased sharply over the past few years. Despite this trend, the profitability of credit card banks not only remains high relative to the rest of the banking industry but continues to grow. This article examines recent trends in credit card bank profitability and, by looking beyond the aggregate data, uncovers some important differences between credit card banks owned by bank holding companies and those owned by nonbank firms.
Journal Article
Still toe-to-toe: banks and nonbanks at the end of the '80s
Working Paper
Dollarization Waves: New Evidence from a Comprehensive International Bond Database
We investigate how the U.S. dollar's prominence in the denomination of international debt securities has evolved in recent decades, using a comprehensive global dataset with far more extensive coverage than datasets used in prior literature. We find no monotonic dollarization or de-dollarization trend; instead, the dollar's share exhibits a wavelike pattern. We document three dollarization waves since the 1960s. The last wave, following the global financial crisis, lifted the dollar's share nearly back to its level at the euro's launch in 2000. Our findings are robust to composition and ...
Conference Paper
The role of nonbanks in commercial lending
Working Paper
The importance of check-cashing businesses to the unbanked: racial/ethnic differences
The roughly 9.5 percent of all U.S. families that are without some type of transaction account (unbanked) are disproportionately represented by minorities. The unbanked often must rely on alternative ways to carry out basic financial transactions such as cashing payroll checks and paying bills. This study analyzes unique survey data and finds that a consumer's decision to patronize check-cashing businesses is jointly made with the decision to be unbanked. For the unbanked, these businesses are an important source for financial services. Attributes that contribute to these decisions, however, ...