On September 24-25, 2009, the Research Department and the Payment Cards Center of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia held their fifth joint conference to present and discuss the latest research on consumer credit and payments. Sixty participants attended the conference, which included...

Bank capital has been much in the news during the recent financial crisis. In 2008 and 2009 the U.S. government injected $235 billion of capital into the banking system as part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). In 2009, bank regulators carried out a full-scale evaluation of the...

On September 22-23, 2011, the Research Department and the Payment Cards Center of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia held their sixth joint conference to present and discuss the latest research on consumer credit and payments. Eighty-four participants attended the conference, which...

In traditional banking arrangements, households hold their savings in the form of deposits at the bank, which makes loans to both firms and households and holds these loans to maturity. But in the United States, and to a lesser extent in other developed countries, markets have increasingly taken...

Mitchell Berlin summarizes new research on household finance presented at a joint conference sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia's Research Department and Payment Cards Center.

In response to the financial crisis, stricter rules are being phased in for foreign banks operating on U.S. soil. Mitchell Berlin explains how global banking drives efficiency, how the new rules may impede that efficiency, and why the rules may nevertheless be necessary.

Mitchell Berlin discusses recent theories of how firms choose their debt maturity. Some of these theories are very useful for explaining how chief financial officers (CFOs) choose the maturity of their firms’ debt. However, CFOs seem to believe that they can predict future interest rates and...

A firm’s passage from borrowing from a single lender to using multiple lenders is often viewed as an inevitable progression in the life of a firm. While there is a strong element of truth in this view, it is also incomplete. The underlying economics of moving from one lender to many involves...