Abstract Bank regulators are required to consider a bank’s record of providing credit to low- and moderate-income neighborhoods and individuals in approving bank applications for mergers and acquisitions. We provide evidence that banks self-regulate by strategically increasing their lending to...

Bank regulators are required to consider a bank's record of providing credit to low- and moderate-income neighborhoods and individuals in approving bank applications for mergers and acquisitions. We provide evidence that banks self-regulate by strategically increasing their lending to these...

We address the following questions concerning bank capital: why are banks so highly levered, what are the consequences of this leverage for the economy as a whole, and how can robust capital regulation be designed to restrict bank leverage to levels that do not generate excessive systemic risk?...

We consider a model in which banks face two moral hazard problems: 1) asset substitution by shareholders, which can occur when banks make socially-inefficient, risky loans; and 2) managerial under-provision of effort in loan monitoring. The privately-optimal level of bank leverage is neither too...

The subprime crisis highlights how little we know about bank governance. This paper addresses a long-standing gap in the literature by analyzing the relationship between board governance and performance using a sample of banking firm data that spans 34years. We find that board independence is...

A conflict of interest exists when a party to a transaction could potentially make a gain from taking actions that are detrimental to the other party in the transaction. This paper examines the economics of conflicts of interest in financial institutions and reviews the growing empirical...

Between 1995 and 1998, actual growth in nominal compensation per hour (CPH) accelerated from approximately 2 percent to 5 percent. Yet as labor markets continued to tighten in 1999, the growth in CPH paradoxically slowed. In this article, we attempt to solve this aggregate wage puzzle by...