Search Results
Journal Article
Government securities investments of commercial banks
Government securities holdings at U.S. commercial banks have risen rapidly since 1990. The author contrasts the recent rise with increases observed during and after earlier recessions and evaluates possible explanations for the buildup. In addition, he presents a rough estimate of the interest exposure created solely by the securities acquisitions and compares it with estimates for earlier periods when commercial banks also added U.S. securities to their portfolios at a fast rate.
Journal Article
Interstate banking and the outflows of local funds
Working Paper
Multibank holding companies and bank behavior
The most dramatic development in banking in recent years has been the rise of bank holding companies. More than 1,750 of these banking operations now control most of America's bank assets and deposits.
Journal Article
Risk, regulation, and bank holding company expansion into nonbanking
When banking institutions can expand into other lines of business, some think they will diversify to reduce their total risk. Others think just the opposite. In this article, John H. Boyd and Stanley L. Graham explain the reasoning behind these two views and then test to see which one best describes the behavior of U.S. bank holding companies since 1970. They find that in 1971-77, when these companies were relatively free to invest in some new lines of business, diversification was associated with greater risk of failure. But in 1977-83, when the companies were more tightly regulated, that ...
Journal Article
Specialization, risk, and capital in banking
Diversification is certainly the simplest and perhaps the oldest approach to managing the trade-off between portfolio risk and return. Because diversification tends to reduce risk without a proportional reduction in returns, an overwhelming majority of commercial banks have diversified portfolios. Larger banks usually are organized into multiple specialized lines of business; smaller banks generally hold a higher proportion of marketable securities whose returns are not tied to a particular geographic market. A much smaller number of banks have chosen to ignore the benefits of diversification ...
Newsletter
The Cyprus crisis through the lens of bank investors
Last year, Cyprus joined its neighbor Greece on the list of eurozone countries in financial crisis. Although Cyprus is one of the smallest economies in the euro area, following the announcement of the official financial aid package for Cyprus on March 16, 2013, bank investors in the rest of the eurozone suffered large losses. Our analysis indicates that bank investors interpreted the Cypriot aid package as potentially forming a template for future eurozone bank restructurings, whereby bank investors would bear a higher fraction of the resolution costs. .
Report
Money market funds intermediation, bank instability, and contagion
In recent years, U.S. banks have increasingly relied on deposits from financial intermediaries, especially money market funds (MMFs), which collect funds from large institutional investors and lend them to banks. In this paper, we show that intermediation through MMFs allows investors to limit their exposure to a given bank (i.e., reap gains from diversification). However, since MMFs are themselves subject to runs from their own investors, a banking system intermediated through MMFs is more unstable than one in which investors interact directly with banks. A mechanism through which ...
Journal Article
Portfolio credit risk
This paper was presented at the conference "Financial services at the crossroads: capital regulation in the twenty-first century" as part of session 2, "Credit risk modeling." The conference, held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on February 26-27, 1998, was designed to encourage a consensus between the public and private sectors on an agenda for capital regulation in the new century.
Conference Paper
Legal risk as a determinant of syndicate structure in the project finance loan market
This paper examines how legal risk, defined as the strength of creditor rights and legal enforcement, affects debt ownership concentration in the project finance loan market. Using a sample of 495 project finance loan tranches from 61 countries, worth $151 billion, we document high levels of debt ownership concentration: the largest single bank holds 20.3% while the top five banks collectively hold 61.2% of a typical project finance loan tranche. We also show that weak creditor rights and poor legal enforcement are associated with more diffuse ownership structures, which leads us to conclude ...
Working Paper
Banks and derivatives