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Working Paper
Assessing Regulatory Responses to Banking Crises
During banking crises, regulators must decide between bailouts or liquidations, neither of which are publicly popular. However, making a comprehensive assessment of regulators requires examining all their decisions against their dual objectives of preserving financial stability and discouraging moral hazard. I develop a Bayesian latent class model to assess regulators on these competing objectives and evaluate banking and savings and loan (S&L) regulators during the 1980s crises. I find that the banking authority (FDIC) conformed to these objectives whereas the S&L regulator (FSLIC), which ...
Journal Article
Government Assistance and Moral Hazard: Evidence from the Savings and Loan Crisis
When regulators intervene to rescue failing financial institutions, they may lead banks to expect future assistance and increase their risk-taking. To avoid incentivizing risky behavior, regulators often try to signal that they will not assist banks in a future crisis. Regulations passed during the savings and loan (S&L) crisis in the 1980s provide a rare example of policies that in fact discouraged risk-taking. After a wave of S&L failures, the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation (FSLIC) liquidated or sold some failed S&Ls but assisted others to keep them in operation. In 1989, ...
Working Paper
Risk-Shifting, Regulation, and Government Assistance
This paper examines an episode when policy response to a financial crisis effectively incentivized financial institutions to reallocate their portfolios toward safe assets. Following a shift to a regime of enhanced regulation and scaled-down public assistance during the savings and loan crisis in 1989, I find that thrifts with a high probability of failure increased their composition of safe assets relative to thrifts with a low probability of failure. The findings also show a shift to safe assets among stock thrifts relative to mutual thrifts, thereby providing evidence of risk-shifting from ...