Bank Regulation: Will Regulators Catch Up with the Market?

Legislation on financial services modernization has taken on special urgency since the banking industry is transforming itself through mergers stretching across financial services and across countries. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.), the new chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, has made bank regulatory reform his "number-one priority." A review of historical and contemporary evidence shows how market forces can address concerns about consumer protection and the soundness of the financial system. The financial services modernization legislation thus should repeal the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act and reform the 1956 Bank Holding Company Act,allow banks to structure their new activities through operating subsidiaries or affiliates,reduce the "moral hazard" of federal deposit insurance by mimicking private bond covenants, andnot raise any new regulatory barriers

The economics and politics of financial modernization

Financial services industry ; Bank supervision ; Industrial policy

Central counterparty clearing: history, innovation, and regulation

Banks and banking, Central ; Derivative securities

Does Political Ambiguity Pay? Corporate Campaign Contributions and the Rewards to Legislator Reputation

Do politicians tend to follow a strategy of ambiguity in their policy positions or a strategy of reputational development to reduce uncertainty about where they stand? Ambiguity could allow a legislator to avoid alienating constituents and to play rival interests off against each other to maximize campaign contributions. Alternatively, reputational clarity could help to reduce uncertainty about a candidate and lead to high campaign contributions from favored interests. We outline a theory that considers conditions under which a politician would and would not prefer reputational development and policy-stance clarity in the context of repeat dealing with special interests. Our proxy for reputational development is the percent of repeat givers to a legislator. Using data on corporate political action committee contributions (PACs) to members of the U.S. House during the seven electoral cycles from 1983/84 to 1995/96, we find that legislators do not appear to follow a strategy of ambiguity and that high reputational development is rewarded with high PAC contributions.

Obstacles to Optimal Policy: The Interplay of Politics and Economics in Shaping Bank Supervision and Regulation Reforms

This paper provides a positive political economy analysis of the most important revision of the U.S. supervision and regulation system during the last two decades, the 1991 Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act (FDICIA). We analyze the impact of private interest groups as well as political-institutional factors on the voting patterns on amendments related to FDICIA and its final passage to assess the empirical importance of different types of obstacles to welfare-enhancing reforms. Rivalry of interests within the industry (large versus small banks) and between industries (banks versus insurance) as well as measures of legislator ideology and partisanship play important roles and, hence, should be taken into account in order to implement successful change. A divide and conquer' strategy with respect to the private interests appears to be effective in bringing about legislative reform. The concluding section draws tentative lessons from the political economy approaches about how to increase the likelihood of welfare-enhancing regulatory change.

¿Cómo se deberían estructurar las instituciones y los mercados financieros? Análisis y opciones de diseño de sistemas financieros

(Disponible en idioma inglés únicamente) En este trabajo se analizan las consecuencias de estructuras financieras alternativas para la eficiencia y la estabilidad financieras. La atención se centra en la estructura organizativa de los bancos. Las estructuras bancarias alternativas varían desde bancos especializados de ámbito restringido hasta bancos universales de ámbito mucho más amplio. Cada estructura bancaria se evalúa según su capacidad de satisfacer los objetivos de eficiencia y estabilidad en la estabilidad del sistema financieros, las economías de escala y alcance, la competencia, evitar los excesos regulatorios, los conflictos de intereses y la manipulación política, el control empresarial y la gestión de crisis financieras, y el control monetario. Ninguna reforma sirve para todos los países por igual y ninguna reforma garantiza por sí sola el logro o el mantenimiento de los objetivos.

Throwing Good Money after Bad? Board Connections and Conflicts in Bank Lending

This paper investigates the frequency of connections between banks and non-financial firms through board linkages and whether those connections affect lending and borrowing behavior. Although a board linkages may reduce the costs of information flows between the lender and borrower, a board linkage may generate pressure for special treatment of a borrower not normally justifiable on economic grounds. To address this issue, we first document that banks are heavily involved in the corporate governance network through frequent board linkages. Banks tend to have larger boards with a higher proportion of outside directors than non-financial firms, and bank officer-directors tend to have more external board directorships than executives of non-financial firms. We then show that low-information cost firms – large firms with a high proportion of tangible assets and relatively stable stock returns -- are most likely to have board connections to banks. These same low-information cost firms are also more likely to borrow from their connected bank, and when they do so the terms of the loan appear similar to loans to unconnected firms. In contrast to studies of Mexico, Russia and Asia where connections have been misused, our results suggest that avoidance of potential conflicts of interest explains both the allocation and behavior of bankers in the U.S. corporate governance system.