Financial safety nets are incomplete social contracts that assign responsibility to various economic sectors for preventing, detecting, and paying for potentially crippling losses at financial institutions. This paper uses the theories of incomplete contracts and sequential bargaining to...

This paper argues that an implicit deposit-insurance credit enhancement is extended to any nondeposit savings vehicle offered by a very large bank. This unpriced credit enhancement helps to explain the preference revealed by very large U.S. banks for gearing up to offer mutual funds instead of...

This paper studies the impact of technological change and regulatory competition on governmental efforts to generate rents for banks in two stylized regulatory environments. In the first environment, incentive-conflicted regulators attempt to create rents by restricting the size and scope of...