We argue that the risk of banks is hard for outsiders to judge because the risk of their mostly financial assets is either hard to measure (opaque) or easy to change. We report evidence that bond rating agencies seem to disagree more over banks than over other types of firms. Among banks, bond...

We investigate whether the “stress test,” the extraordinary examination of the nineteen largest U.S. bank holding companies conducted by federal bank supervisors in 2009, produced the information demanded by the market. Using standard event study techniques, we find that the market had...

A model of bank asset sales in which information asymmetries create the incentive for unregulated banks to originate and sell loans to other banks, rather than fund them with deposit liabilities. Private information implies that bankers can fund local loans only to the extent that their capital...

A presentation of a theoretical model of regional banking using plausible information asymmetries to explain how local bank capital may affect the funding of regional investments, concluding that regional banking conditions can affect the efficiency of investment and the level of future...

Beginning in 1998, U.S. commercial banks may determine their regulatory capital requirements for financial market risk exposure using value-at-risk (VaR) models i.e., models of the time-varying distributions of portfolio returns. Currently, regulators have available three hypothesis-testing...

Although bank capital regulation permits a bank to choose freely between equity and subordinated debt to meet capital requirements, lenders and investors view debt and equity as imperfect substitutes. It follows that the mix of debt in regulatory capital should isolate the role that the market...

The Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act of 1989 limits thrift goodwill that can be counted as regulatory capital. This paper examines if and why the goodwill clause adversely affected the market value of thrifts. The main findings are that goodwill had a large negative...

We use a large matched sample of individual loans, borrowers, and banks to investigate whether bank financial health affects terms of lending, holding constant proxies for borrower risk and information costs. In particular, we focus on measuring effects of borrower and bank characteristics on...

I present evidence that the cross-guarantee authority granted to the FDIC by the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act of 1989 has unexpectedly strengthened the Federal Reserve's source-of-strength doctrine. In particular, I find that a bank affiliated with a multi-bank...

The goal of integrated risk management in a financial institution is to measure and manage risk and capital across a range of diverse business activities. This requires an approach for aggregating risk types (market, credit, and operational) whose distributional shapes vary considerably. In this...