OnApril 1, 2002, the Japanese government lifted a blanket guarantee of all deposits and began limiting the coverage of time deposits. This paper uses this deposit insurance reform as a natural experiment to investigate the relationship between deposit insurance coverage and market discipline. I find that the reform raised the sensitivity of interest rates on deposits, and that of deposit quanti...

Article history: Received 18 September 2014 Received in revised form 24 September 2014 Accepted 15 October 2014 Available online 20 October 2014 This paper investigates product-specific scale economies of banks with respect to off-balance sheet operations. The cost benefits from the non-separability of outputs available to banks that imply the role of OBS activities on bank scale economies are ...

Is Greece a reforming economy? The purpose of this paper is to present the evolution and structure of the banking sector in Greece, with reference to the parallel experiences of the Eastern European (EE) countries. In Section 2, we are concerned with the domestic economic environment within which the Greek Banking System (GBS) operates. and the pressures building up within the system encouragin...

This paper examines how the aliation of banking and commerce a€ects the ®rmÕs investment eciency and the bankÕs risk exposure. The bankÕs holding of a borrowing ®rmÕs equity reduces the agency con ̄ict between the ®rm and the bank, but increases the monitoring need of uninformed debtholders. Thus, the ®rmÕs investment eciency is maximized when the bankÕs equity share is between zero and its d...

This paper documents a positive relation between internationalization and bank risk. This is consistent with the empirical dominance of the market risk hypothesis – whereby internationalization increases banks’ risk due to market-specific factors – over the diversification hypothesis – whereby internationalization allows banks to reduce risk through increased diversification of their operations...

Since 1990, federal bank supervisors have announced formal enforcement actions publicly. The change in regime provides a natural laboratory to test two propositions: (1) claims by economists that putting confidential supervisory information in the public domain will enhance market discipline and (2) claims by bank supervisors that releasing such data will spark runs. To evaluate these propositi...

When a company goes public it is standard practice that more shares are allocated than issued. The resulting short position that the offering syndicate holds is commonly filled either by aftermarket trading or by the execution of the so-called overallotment option, a standard feature of IPO arrangements. We propose a simple theoretical model to study the implications of this combination of shor...

We show that a competitive banking system is inconsistent with an optimum quantity of private money. Because bankers cannot commit to their promises and the composition of their assets is not publicly observable, a positive franchise value is required to induce the full convertibility of bank liabilities. Under perfect competition, a positive franchise value can be obtained only if the return o...

This paper is concerned with examining behaviour of firms (banks) and consumers (banks’ customers) in the event of a new technology (internet banking) introduction. The determinants of consumer adoption of internet banking are characterised using survey data from Korea in both static and dynamic framework. I find evidence that adoption of internet banking is influenced by sex, age, marital stat...

The Basel II Accord requires banks to establish rigorous statistical procedures for the estimation and validation of default and ratings transition probabilities. This raises great technical challenges when sufficient default data are not available, as is the case for low default portfolios. We develop a new model that describes the typical internal credit rating process used by banks. The mode...