We explore the impact of supervision on the riskiness, profitability, and growth of U.S. banks. Using data on supervisors' time use, we demonstrate that the top-ranked banks by size within a supervisory district receive more attention from supervisors, even after controlling for size,...

Investigations into the recent financial crisis have found that banking regulators knew or should have known of many of the problems that would ultimately cripple the finance industry. We argue that their failure to address those problems prior to the crisis was at least partly due to misaligned...

This paper estimates causal effects of supervision on bank performance using discontinuities in the minimum frequency of examinations required by regulation. This frequency is discontinuous at a value of bank assets that varied over time, allowing us to break the endogeneity between supervision...