Bank Loan Commitments and Interest Rate Volatility

Bank loan commitments are examined in the context of option pricing models and a valuation formula is obtained. The partial takedown phenomenon, which is both distinctive and vexatious, is considered in detail. Finally, extimates of the value of U.S. bank loan commitments and their sensitivity to interest rate changes are provided.

Information Reusability, Competition and Bank Asset Quality

The paper explains the recent decline in bank asset quality using the notion of information reusability. Banks are viewed as information processors; they exist because of their advantage in extracting the surplus associated with the reusability of borrower-specific information. It is shown that a bank's incentive to screen loan applicants, and hence maintain the quality of its assets, depends on the surplus this screening can produce, which in turn depends on information reusability. Two recent changes in banks' operating environment are increased competition and greater temporal volatility in borrower credit risks. The former has directly reduced banks' informational surplus while the latter has impaired information reusability. Hence screening expenditures have been reduced and the diminution of screening has lowered the quality of bank assets. It is also shown that an increase in deposit insurance premia has an effect similar to that of narrowing interest spreads and therefore will result in reduced asset screening and impaired asset quality.

Bank Funding Modes

We examine a bank's choice of whether to fund the loans it originates by emitting deposits or to sell the loans to investors. With common knowledge of loan quality and laissez faire banking, we find that the choice is irrelevant. With asymmetric information but without government intervention, we find that better quality assets will be sold (securitized) and poorer quality assets will be funded with deposits. Public regulation can influence the bank's choice; subsidies can cause a bank to favor deposit funding, but mutual funds and third-party insurers may mitigate the effects of governmental subsidies.

Is Fairly Priced Deposit Insurance Possible?

We analyze risk-sensitive, incentive-compatible deposit insurance in the presence of private information and moral hazard. Without deposit-linked subsidies it is impossible to implement risk-sensitive, incentive- compatible deposit insurance pricing in a competitive, deregulared environment, except when the deposit insurer is the least risk averase agent in the economy. We establish this formally in the context of an insurance scheme in which privately informed depository institutions are offered deposit insurance premia contingent on reported capital; the result holds for alternative sorting instruments as well. This suggests a contradiction between deregulation and fairly priced, risk-sensitive deposit insurance.

Photography-based taxonomy is inadequate, unnecessary, and potentially harmful for biological sciences

The question whether taxonomic descriptions naming new animal species without type specimen(s) deposited in collections should be accepted for publication by scientific journals and allowed by the Code has already been discussed in Zootaxa (Dubois & Nemésio 2007; Donegan 2008, 2009; Nemésio 2009a–b; Dubois 2009; Gentile & Snell 2009; Minelli 2009; Cianferoni & Bartolozzi 2016; Amorim et al. 2016). This question was again raised in a letter supported by 35 signatories published in the journal Nature (Pape et al. 2016) on 15 September 2016. On 25 September 2016, the following rebuttal (strictly limited to 300 words as per the editorial rules of Nature) was submitted to Nature, which on 18 October 2016 refused to publish it. As we think this problem is a very important one for zoological taxonomy, this text is published here exactly as submitted to Nature, followed by the list of the 493 taxonomists and collection-based researchers who signed it in the short time span from 20 September to 6 October 2016