In the first part (in the previous issue of Economic Review) of this two-part study, the authors identified a number of possible benefits from combining banking and commerce, including portfolio diversification, the creation of internal capital markets, and economies of scale and scope. This...

The policy debate on whether to strengthen or to remove the legal barriers between banking and commerce has paid little attention to what the practical effects of removing the barriers would be. To help answer this question, this article, the first part of a two-part study, provides an overview...

In 1993, when this article was originally published, Congress had recently passed the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act of 1991 (FDICIA) to reduce taxpayers' exposure to financial system losses, including their exposure at too big to fail financial institutions. In his new...

Given the vast sums of money that mutual and pension fund managers invest, an important question is how they should go about deciding which assets, especially which stocks, they should purchase. One school of thought argues that investment policies should reflect some set of social values. This...

Current discussions about deposit insurance reform center on issues such as the size of insurance premiums, the size of the fund, and the size of the coverage limits-all issues that reflect a concern with how to allocate the losses arising from bank failures. The authors of this article argue...

The agencies that regulate banks are involved in an ongoing debate about the appropriate way for banks and other lenders to account for default risk on loans. Accounting authorities are concerned with whether the accounting method meets the needs of general-purpose users of financial statements,...