Search Results
Journal Article
Capital Requirements and Bailouts
We use balance sheet and stock market data for the major U.S. banking institutions during and after the 2007-2008 financial crisis to estimate the magnitude of the losses experienced by these institutions due to the crisis. We then use these estimates to assess the impact of the crisis under alternative, and higher, capital requirements. We find that substantially higher capital requirements (in the 20 to 30 percent range) would have substantially reduced the vulnerability of these financial institutions, and consequently, they would have significantly reduced the need of a public bailout.
Speech
Global financial stability - the road ahead
Remarks at the Tenth Asia-Pacific High Level Meeting on Banking Supervision, Auckland, New Zealand
Report
Bank Complexity, Governance, and Risk
Bank holding companies (BHCs) can be complex organizations, conducting multiple lines of business through many distinct legal entities and across a range of geographies. While such complexity raises the costs of bank resolution when organizations fail, the effect of complexity on BHCs’ broader risk profiles is less well understood. Business, organizational, and geographic complexity can engender explicit trade-offs between the agency problems that increase risk and the diversification, liquidity management, and synergy improvements that reduce risk. The outcomes of such trade-offs may ...
Speech
Opening remarks at the Workshop on Reforming Culture and Behavior in the Financial Services Industry.
Remarks at the Workshop on Reforming Culture and Behavior in the Financial Services Industry, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, New York City.
Working Paper
Bank Complexity, Governance, and Risk
Bank holding companies (BHCs) can be complex organizations, conducting multiple lines of business through many distinct legal entities and across a range of geographies. While such complexity raises the the costs of bank resolution when organizations fail, the effect of complexity on BHCs' broader risk profiles is less well understood. Business, organizational, and geographic complexity can engender explicit trade-offs between the agency problems that increase risk and the diversification, liquidity management, and synergy improvements that reduce risk. The outcomes of such trade-offs may ...
Speech
Panel remarks at the Clearing House annual conference
Remarks at The Clearing House Annual Conference, New York City.
Working Paper
Explaining the Life Cycle of Bank-Sponsored Money Market Funds: An Application of the Regulatory Dialectic
In this paper, we present empirical evidence of the regulatory dialectic in the prime institutional money market fund (PI-MMF) industry. The “regulatory dialectic”, developed by Kane (1977, 1981), describes how banks and regulators react to each other. For decades, a cap on commercial deposit interest rates fueled dramatic growth in bank-sponsored PI-MMFs as a form of shadow banking. During the growth period, banks with more commercial deposits were more likely to enter the PI-MMF industry in an effort to keep their commercial customers in affiliated subsidiaries. However, the 2008 crisis ...
Discussion Paper
Do Big Banks Have Lower Operating Costs?
Despite recent financial reforms, there is still widespread concern that large banking firms remain “too big to fail.” As a solution, some reformers advocate capping the size of the largest banking firms. One consideration, however, is that while early literature found limited evidence for economies of scale, recent academic research has found evidence of scale economies in banking, even for the largest banking firms, implying that such caps could impose real costs on the economy. In our contribution to the volume on large and complex banks, we extend this line of research by studying the ...
Speech
The role of the Federal Reserve—lessons from financial crises: Remarks at the Annual Meeting of the Virginia Association of Economists, Virginia Military Institute, Lexington, Virginia
Remarks at the Annual Meeting of the Virginia Association of Economists, Virginia Military Institute, Lexington, Virginia.
Discussion Paper
Resolving \\"Too Big to Fail\\"
Many market participants believe that large financial institutions enjoy an implicit guarantee that the government will step in to rescue them from potential failure. These ?Too Big to Fail? (TBTF) issues became particularly salient during the 2008 crisis. From the government?s perspective, rescuing these financial institutions can be important to avoid harm to the financial system. The bailouts also artificially lower the risk borne by investors and the financing costs of big banks. The Dodd-Frank Act attempts to remove the incentive for governments to bail out banks in the first place by ...