Conventional wisdom holds that the enactment of federal deposit insurance helped small rural banks at the expense of large urban institutions. This paper uses asymmetric information, agency-cost paradigms from corporate finance theory and data on bank stock prices to show how deposit insurance...

This paper studies the impact of broad changes in the economic and financial environment on the savings rate and portfolio composition of individuals in different age groups and household types. Employing survey data, household savings are cumulated as increases in net transactable wealth...

Federal regulators characterize capital forbearance as an efficient way of nursing weak banks and thrifts back to health. An alternative hypothesis is that forbearance reflects inefficient costs of agency that fall on federal deposit-insurance funds. Divergences between regulatory measures of a...

This paper explains that financial safety nets exist because of difficulties in enforcing contracts and shows that elements of deposit-insurance schemes differ substantially across countries. It argues that differences in the design of financial safety nets correlate significantly with...

Using the Goldfeld and Quandt switching regression method, this paper investigates variability over 1975-85 in the risk components of bank and saving and loan stock. We develop evidence that the market-beta, interest-sensitivity, and residual risk of deposit-institution stock vary significantly...

This essay shows that government credit-allocation schemes generate incentive conflicts that undermine the quality of bank supervision and eventually produce banking crisis. For political reasons, most countries establish a regulatory culture that embraces three economically contradictory...

This paper decomposes both the market sensitivity and the interest-rate sensitivity of bank stock into on-balance-sheet and off-balance-sheet components. It derives these constituent and often-offsetting sensitivities from a nonstationary three-equation model that employs accounting and...

This paper tests the optimal-contracting hypothesis, drawing upon data from a natural experiment that ended during the Great Depression. The subjects of our experiment are bank stockholders. The experimental manipulation concerns the imposition of state or federal restrictions on the contracts...

Unlike the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation and the Bank Insurance Fund, the National Credit Union Share Insurance Fund (NCUSIF) entered the 1990s in a state of accounting solvency. This paper develops evidence to show the more important fact that NCUSIF remained solvent in a...

Changes in political attitudes toward subsidizing mortgage loans and in technologies for transacting mortgage loans and for pooling and refinancing individual mortgage contracts threaten to remake the face of U.S. mortgage markets. This paper focuses on economic-efficiency benefits embodied in...