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Working Paper
Capital taxation during the U.S. Great Depression
Previous studies quantifying the effects of increased capital taxation during the U.S. Great Depression find that its contribution is small, both in accounting for the downturn in the early 1930s and in accounting for the slow recovery after 1934. This paper confirms that the effects are small in the case of taxation of business profits, but finds large effects in the case of taxation of dividend income. Tax rates on dividends rose dramatically during the 1930s and, when fed into a general equilibrium model, imply significant declines in investment and equity values and nontrivial declines in ...
Journal Article
Bank profits rebound as loss set-asides ease
Banks across the U.S., including the Eleventh Federal Reserve District, appear to be recovering from the financial crisis that began in mid-2007. The news is welcome because a healthy banking sector spurs economic growth by providing financing for businesses to expand investment spending and for consumers to purchase goods and services. ; Data for 2010 show strong profit growth, with banks across the nation rebounding from a net loss in 2009 and those in the Dallas-based Eleventh District almost doubling their profits. There was also good news regarding asset quality: Problem loans are ...
Journal Article
How do changes in market interest rates affect bank profits?
Journal Article
Profits and balance sheet developments at U.S. commercial banks in 2009
Reviews recent developments in the balance sheets and in the profitability of U.S. commercial banks. The article discusses how developments in the U.S. banking industry in 2009 and early 2010 were related to changes in financial markets and in the broader economy.
Journal Article
Thrift institutions in recent year
Working Paper
Measuring the performance of banks: theory, practice, evidence, and some policy implications
The unique capital structure of commercial banking ? funding production with demandable debt that participates in the economy?s payments system ? affects various aspects of banking. It shapes banks? comparative advantage in providing financial products and services to informationally opaque customers, their ability to diversify credit and liquidity risk, and how they are regulated, including the need to obtain a charter to operate and explicit and implicit federal guarantees of bank liabilities to reduce the probability of bank runs. These aspects of banking affect a bank?s choice of risk vs. ...
Journal Article
Profit in a free economy
Working Paper
Price setting in a leading Swiss online supermarket
We study a newly released data set of scanner prices for food products in a large Swiss online supermarket. We find that average prices change about every two months, but when we exclude temporary sales, prices are extremely sticky, changing on average once every three years. Non-sale price behavior is broadly consistent with menu cost models of sticky prices. When we focus specifically on the behavior of sale prices, however, we find that the characteristics of price adjustment seems to be substantially at odds with standard theory.