We investigate bank holding companies’ window dressing of quarter-end short-term borrowings. We find evidence of downward window dressing of short-term borrowings through repo and federal funds that appears material for a large fraction of the sample. Such downward window dressing is more pronounced at banks with higher leverage, lower capital adequacy ratios, and greater management compensatio...

We examine what is perceived as one of the main culprits in the occurrence of banking crises: financial liberalization. As is typically argued, if liberalization is accompanied by insufficient prudential supervision of the banking sector, it will result in excessive risk taking by financial intermediaries and a subsequent crisis. Having evaluated the empirical validity of this hypothesis, we co...

In this paper, we investigate the short-run and long-run macroeconomic effects of bank net worth and capital adequacy regulations. In general, capital adequacy regulations work as a stabilizer in the sense that they reduce the macroeconomic effects of negative productivity shocks. In addition, strengthening of the regulations increases the long-run capital stock, although it may lead the econom...

Policy changes in Indonesian banking from 1983 through 1990 saw the removal of controls on interest rates, lending, and expansion of branch networks, and of barriers to entry. The dismantling of loan subsidy programmes financed by the central bank ran in parallel with these changes. Private banks have been enabled to erode rapidly the market share of the previously dominant, but less efficient ...

This paper uses Data Envelopment Analysis to measure labor use efficiency of individual branches of a large public sector bank with several thousand branches across India. We find considerable variation in the average levels of efficiency across the four metropolitan regions considered in this study. In this context, we introduce the concept of area or spatial efficiency for each region relativ...

This paper assesses the effect of political institutions on stock market performance in 14 African countries for which stock market data is available for the period 1990-2010. The estimation technique used is a Two-Stage-Least Squares Instrumental Variable methodology. Political regime channels of democracy, polity and autocracy are instrumented with legal-origins, religious-legacies, income-le...

This paper reviews the economic theory of regulation and surveys the empirical evidence on its application to past and recent changes in U.S. securities regulation. The theory provides multiple potential motives for regulation and cautions the empirical researcher against naïve modeling of the costs and benefits of regulatory change. Moreover, the nature of the regulatory process compounds the ...

This paper examines the role of the federal government in the market for terrorism reinsurance. We investigate the stock price response of affected industries to a sequence of 13 events culminating in the enactment of the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act (TRIA) of 2002. In the industries most likely to be affected by TRIA—banking, construction, insurance, real estate investment trusts, transportati...

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act of 1991 (FDICIA) directed the FDIC to resolve bank failures in the least costly manner, shifting more of the failure-resolution burden to jumbo-CD holders. We examine the sensitivity of jumbo-CD yields and runoffs to failure risk before and after FDICIA. We also examine the economic significance of estimated risk sensitivities before and...

Fraud and misconduct in financial markets have recently become a key regulatory issue against the backdrop of the financial crisis. This paper investigates the sanctions policy and practices of the French financial regulator, Autorité des Marchés Financiers (AMF). It argues that, over time, the AMF has shifted from substantive to procedural regulation of finance. This shift consists in departin...