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Working Paper
Did FDICIA enhance market discipline on community banks? a look at evidence from the jumbo-CD market
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act of 1991 (FDICIA) directed the FDIC to resolve bank failures in the least costly manner, shifting more of the failure-resolution burden to jumbo-CD holders. We examine the sensitivity of jumbo-CD yields and runoffs to failure risk before and after FDICIA. We also examine the economic significance of estimated risk sensitivities before and after the Act, looking at the implied impact of risk on bank funding costs and profits. The evidence indicates that yields and runoff were sensitive to risk before and after FDICIA, but that this ...
Working Paper
Do jumbo-CD holders care about anything?
Uninsured deposits represent a theoretically appealing but relatively untested alternative to subordinated debt for incorporating market discipline into banking supervision. To make the deposit market a useful supervisory tool, it is necessary to know what types of risk are priced by depositors and in what proportions. Using a clustering technique to select from among a large set of potential regressors, as well as a carefully chosen set of control variables, we attempt to determine the types of risk that cause uninsured depositors to react in both the price and quantity dimensions. As a ...
Working Paper
The British tripartite financial supervision system in the face of the Northern Rock run
The Northern Rock debacle - Britain's first bank run in 141 years - was the Tripartite regulatory system's first live ammunition test since its establishment in 1997. The aftermath of the crisis lists the destruction of Britain's fifth largest mortgage lender, the tarnishing of the Bank of England's well-established reputation, and the loss of confidence in the reformed regulatory system - a system that had been considered a paragon by policymakers and reformers around the world. As market observers, politicians, investors and bankers criticize not only the mortgage lender for its extreme ...
Working Paper
Relationship loans and regulatory capital: why fair-value accounting is inappropriate for bank loans
Banks have been required to report many securities and all derivatives at fair values under U.S. GAAP rules for many years. Soon, International Accounting Standards will provide some banks with a ?fair-value option? for loans, also. A similar movement toward applying fair values to loans may occur in the U.S. in the near future, too. ; This paper argues that fair-value accounting is inappropriate for banks? relationship loans from the standpoint of safety-and-soundness supervision?that is, for the purposes of calculating a bank?s regulatory capital. The argument is straightforward, although ...
Working Paper
Gains from financial integration in the European union: evidence for new and old members
We estimate potential welfare gains from financial integration and corresponding better insurance against country-specific shocks to output (risk sharing) for the twenty-five European Union countries. Using theoretical utility-based measures we express the gains from risk sharing as the utility equivalent of a permanent increase in consumption. We report positive potential welfare gains for all the EU countries if they move toward full risk sharing. Ten country-members who joined the Union in 2004 have more volatile or counter-cyclical consumption and output and would obtain much higher ...
Working Paper
Scale economies and geographic diversification as forces driving community bank mergers
Mergers of community banks across economic market areas potentially reduce both idiosyncratic and local market risk. Idiosyncratic risk may be reduced because the larger post merger bank has a larger customer base. Negative credit and liquidity shocks from individual customers would have smaller effects on the portfolio of the merged entity than on the individual community banks involved in the merger. Geographic dispersion of banking activities across economic market areas may reduce local market risk because an adverse economic development that is unique to one market area will not affect a ...
Working Paper
Financial condition of community banks
This article examines the condition of the banking industry in the United States, with an emphasis on community banks. In spite of the recent recession, the condition of the banking industry is substantially better than during the recession of 1990-91. There has been an increase in problem loans at both large and small banks during recent quarters, and nonperforming loans have risen relative to the allowance for loan and lease losses. Among the banks in each of the size groups in this article, however, ratios of equity to total assets in recent quarters are at about their highest levels since ...
Working Paper
The demise of community banks? local economic shocks aren't to blame
A potentially troubling characteristic of the U.S. banking industry is the geographic concentration of many community banks* offices and operations. If geographic concentration of operations exposes banks to local market risk, we should observe a widespread decline in their financial performance following adverse local economic shocks. In addition, geographic diversification should help banks reduce risk significantly. By analyzing the performance of geographically concentrated U.S. community banks exposed to severe unemployment shocks in the 1990s, I find that banks are not systematically ...
Working Paper
In search of the natural rate of unemployment
The natural rate of unemployment can be measured as the time-varying steady state of a structural vector autoregression. For post-War U.S. data, the natural rate implied by this approach is more volatile than most previous estimates, with its movements accounting for the bulk of the variation in the unemployment rate, as well as substantial portions of the variation in aggregate output and inflation. These movements, in turn, can be related to variables associated with labor-market search theory, including unemployment benefits, labor productivity, real wages, and sectoral shifts in the labor ...
Working Paper
The impact of alternative bank monitoring policies on corporate investment and financing decisions
Much of the benefit from bank loans is generated by the specialized monitoring and information gathering role provided by financial institutions, including their role in facilitating the reorganization of firms experiencing financial distress. Despite these numerous benefits, it is somewhat surprising that aggregate trends suggest that the corporate sector has decreased its reliance on bank loans. We model the relationship between alternative bank monitoring policies and corporate investment and financing decisions. Rather than taking the monitoring characteristics of the bank as fixed, we ...