Thousands of new commercial banks have been chartered in the U.S. over the past two decades. This article documents how the financial characteristics of new banks evolve over time, develops a simple theory of why and when new banks fail, and tests the theory using a variety of methods.

We model the failed bank resolution process as a repeated game between a utility-maximizing government resolution authority (RA) and a profit-maximizing banking industry. Limits to resolution technology and political/economic pressure create incentives for the RA to bail out failed complex...

BankCaR is a credit risk model that forecasts the distribution of a commercial bank's charge-offs. The distribution depends only on systematic factors; BankCaR takes each bank and projects its expected charge-off across a distribution of good years and bad years. Since most bank failures occur...

Contagion usually refers to the spillover of the effects of shocks from one or more firms to other firms. Most studies of contagion limit their analysis to how shock affect firms in the same industry, or "intra-industry" contagion. The purpose of this paper is to explore and document the likely...

Bank failures are widely feared for a number of reasons, including concern that depositors may suffer both losses in the value of their deposits (credit losses) and, possibly more importantly, restrictions in access to their deposits (liquidity losses). In the United States, this is not true for...

In the U.S., the insolvency resolution of most corporations is governed by the federal bankruptcy code and is administered by special bankruptcy courts. Most large corporate bankruptcies are resolved under Chapter 11 reorganization proceedings. However, commercial bank insolvencies are governed...