The relaxation of the Glass-Steagall Act (GSA), the Act which separates commercial and investment banking, is currently under debate. Central to this debate is the potential risk reduction of commercial banks due to diversification. This paper, through a thorough and complete examination of the diversification potential, establishes an upper bound of diversification benefits. The results do sup...

Many immunization strategies have been proposed to prevent infectious viruses from spreading through a network. In this work, we study efficient immunization strategies to prevent a default contagion that might occur in a financial network. An essential difference from the previous studies on immunization strategy is that we take into account the possibility of serious side effects. Uniform imm...

Investigating banks’ status has always been a concern to its management and regulatory decisions, which can be carried out by means of income diversification and CAMEL composite. The importance of income diversification is to decline the operation risk. The soundness of banking is also another essential component in the banking industry that can be evaluated by CAMEL. This article’s two primary...

The global financial crisis has precipitated an increasing appreciation of the need for a systemic perspective towards financial stability. For example: What role do large banks play in systemic risk? How should capital adequacy standards recognize this role? How is stability shaped by concentration and diversification in the financial system? We explore these questions using a deliberately sim...

This paper studies the consequences of a regulatory pay cap in proportion to assets on bank risk, bank value, and bank asset allocations. The cap is shown to lower banks’ risk and raise banks’ values by acting against a competitive externality in the labour market. The risk reduction is achieved without the possibility of reduced lending from a Tier 1 increase. The cap encourages diversificatio...

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) creates many opportunities for collaboration between analyst and decision-maker. There are, however, situations in which all of the decision-making units (DMUs) fall under the umbrella of a centralized decision maker that oversees them. Many organizations such as bank branches, chain stores, … can do this. This centralized decision maker unit expect that resource...

We investigate the influence of the dependence between random losses on the shortfall and on the diversification benefit that arises from merging these losses. We prove that increasing the dependence between losses, expressed in terms of correlation order, has an increasing effect on the shortfall, expressed in terms of an appropriate integral stochastic order. Furthermore, increasing the depen...

I analyze banks’ incentives to acquire expertise in judging the credit-worthiness of borrowers in an industry with uncertain business conditions. The optimal industrial organization of bank lending features several banks with industry expertise, as well as a competitive fringe of banks without such expertise. The analysis provides a foundation for analyzing the relative merits of focus vs. dive...