Starting in the early 1990s, banks began to slowly make their way into securities underwriting using their Section 20 subsidiaries. With the enactment of the Gram-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, the long-standing restrictions between commercial- and investment-banking activities were formally removed....

Concern is growing that the U.S. capital markets are losing market share to overseas competitors. A decline in foreign initial public offerings indeed suggests that the U.S. equity market is becoming less attractive to certain issuers. However, evidence on the competitiveness of the U.S. equity...

Prepayment plays a critical role in the performance of mortgage-backed securities. For this reason, market participants have devoted substantial resources to developing formal mathematical models of mortgage prepayment. Despite their considerable efforts, however, the forecasting effectiveness...

This article investigates the specification of discount window borrowing. The author establishes empirically that the borrowing function is heteroskedastic and nonlinear. Subsequently, he proceeds to propose a simple theoretical framework that generates endogenously these anomalies. In...

A large fraction of the companies that went private between 1990 and 2007 were fairly young public firms, often with the same management team making the crucial restructuring decisions at both the time of the initial public offering (IPO) and the buyout. This article investigates the...

We investigate whether the “stress test,” the extraordinary examination of the nineteen largest U.S. bank holding companies conducted by federal bank supervisors in 2009, produced the information demanded by the market. Using standard event study techniques, we find that the market had...