Banks' leverage choices represent a delicate balancing act. Credit discipline argues for more leverage, while balance-sheet opacity and ease of asset substitution argue for less. Meanwhile, regulatory safety nets promote ex post financial stability, but also create perverse incentives for banks...

A framework which allows for the joint testing of the adaptive and rational expectations hypotheses is presented. We assume joint normality of expectations, realizations and variables in the information set, allowing for parsimonious interpretation of the data; conditional first moments are...