Giving the FDIC authority to wind up troubled banks before their tangible net worth is exhausted has reduced the role of government in the insolvency-resolution process. Consistent with an hypothesis that FDICIA has improved incentives, our data show that a markedly larger percentage of troubled...

In this paper, we propose a bank-based explanation for the decade-long Japanese slowdown following the asset price collapse in the early 1990s. We start with the well-known observation that most large Japanese banks were only able to comply with capital standards because regulators were lax in...

We build a model of financial sector illiquidity in an open economy. Illiquidity defined as a situation in which a country's consolidated financial system has potential short-term obligations in foreign currency that exceed the amount of foreign currency it can have access to on short notice can...

This paper uses an asymmetric information framework to understand the causes of the recent financial crisis in Korea. It shows that the Korean data is consistent with this explanation of the crisis. It then draws on this analysis to discuss several lessons that can help guide Korean policymakers...

Which commercial bank supervisory policies ease - or intensify - the degree to which bank corruption is an obstacle to firms raising external finance? Based on new data from more than 2,500 firms across 37 countries, this paper provides the first empirical assessment of the impact of different...

Quantification of operational risk has received increased attention with the inclusion of an explicit capital charge for operational risk under the new Basle proposal. The proposal provides significant flexibility for banks to use internal models to estimate their operational risk, and the...

Even after controlling for local economic conditions, differences in state bank supervision and regulation contribute toward explaining the large variation in state bank suspension rates across U.S. counties during the Great Depression. More stringent capital requirements lowered suspension...

Discussions of financial risk often fail to distinguish between risks that are consciously borne and those that are not. To understand the breeding conditions for financial crises the prime focus of concern should not be simply on large risk-taking per se, but on the unintended, or unanticipated...

We examine the impact of bank supervision on the financing obstacles faced by almost 5,000 corporations across 49 countries. We find that firms in countries with strong official supervisory agencies that directly monitor banks tend to face greater financing obstacles. Moreover, powerful official...

We study bank supervision by combining a theoretical model distinguishing supervision from regulation and a novel dataset on work hours of Federal Reserve supervisors. We highlight the trade-offs between the benefits and costs of supervision and use the model to interpret the relation between...