This paper seeks to contribute to the U.S. housing finance reform conversation by providing a critical assessment of the various types of policy proposals that have been offered. There appears to be a broad consensus to maintain explicit government guarantees for certain narrowly defined...

Market power – how it arises, and how it is measured – is an important topic for the economics field of “industrial organization” (IO). It is also an important topic for managers and for managerial economics, since it can be related to sustainable advantage for a company and it is...

Periodically the question of whether there ought to be a substantially closer connection between the disciplines of industrial organization (IO) and finance has been a topic of conversation within the IO discipline. After documenting three such initiatives that ultimately failed to have lasting...

Antitrust and the financial sector have traditionally had a wary relationship with each other. However, an analysis of the special features of finance and of financial regulation shows that the pro-competition stance of antitrust is as appropriate for the financial sector as it is for the other...

The commercial banking business has changed dramatically over the past 30 years, due in large part to technological change. The paper first describes the role of the financial system in economies and how technological change and financial innovation can affect social welfare. We then survey the...

Antitrust and the financial sector have traditionally had a wary relationship with each other. However, an analysis of the special features of finance and of financial regulation shows that the pro-competition stance of antitrust is as appropriate for the financial sector as it is for the other...

This essay lays out the basics of the “too-big-to-fail” (TBTF) phenomenon: What it means; why it is a problem; the central role that TBTF financial institutions played in the financial crisis of 2008; and why better prudential regulation than was present prior to 2008 is needed for the future

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are unique and controversial participants in the housingfinance system of the United States. Because of these enterprises' federal government charters, the financial markets believe that the government would not allow Fannie and Freddie to fail to honor their debt...

Financial innovation has been described as the life blood of efficient and responsive capital markets. Yet, there have been few quantitative investigations of financial innovation and the diffusion of these new technologies. Of the latter, there have been only three prior quantitative studies,...

This paper reviews the extant empirical studies of financial innovation. Adopting broad criteria, we found just two-dozen studies (24), over half of which (14) had been conducted since 2000. Since some financial innovations are examined by more than one study, only 14 distinct phenomena have...