We examine the effects of changes in competitive conditions on the structure of loan contracts. In particular, we present conditions in which greater loan market competition reduces the stringency of contractual collateral requirements, a prediction that is consistent with anecdotal evidence from loan markets. We also analyze the interaction between the degree of competition and the efficiency ...

Si Chuan University , Sichuan, China Drawing specific reserve separately for operational risk is the requirement of the New Basel Capital Accord. Since 1990, as serious loss incidents in operation risk often happened all over the world, operational risk is taken account into the risk management framework for the first time in New Basel Capital Accord, becoming the three main risk get along with...

Could the Federal Reserve have reversed the decline in the money supply during the Great Depression without causing a loss of confidence in the U.S. commitment to the gold standard? This article uses the $1 billion expansionary open market operation in 1932 as a crucial case study. Using forward exchange rates and interest rate differentials to measure devaluation expectations, we find virtuall...

In second-price or English auctions involving symmetric, independent, private-value bidders the equilibrium outcome may not be efficient if resale is allowed. In addition to the efficient, symmetric equilibrium there exist inefficient, asymmetric equilibria in which the bidder who wins the item offers it for resale to the losers. For the case where the reserve price in the initial auction equal...

Using a recently introduced method to quantify the time-varying lead-lag dependencies between pairs of economic time series (the thermal optimal path method), we test two fundamental tenets of the theory of fixed income: (i) the stock market variations and the yield changes should be anti-correlated; (ii) the change in central bank rates, as a proxy of the monetary policy of the central bank, s...

Online markets are becoming increasingly prevalent and extend to a wide variety of areas such as e-commerce, Grid computing, recommender systems, and sensor networks. To date, much of the existing research has focused on the design and operation of individual auctions or exchanges for allocating goods and services. In practice, however, similar items are typically offered by multiple independen...

Using a sample of U.K. bidder companies from 1984 through 2007, we find that announcement returns are better for bidders of higher excess cash reserve. This suggests that acquisitions by high excess cash reserve bidders are not necessarily value-decreasing as is suggested by the agency theory and found in the U.S. market. Managers may need cash to ensure that all potential good investment oppor...

At first glance, the reader may think that there is little connection between the empirical study of Bordo, Humpage, and Schwartz of the effect of foreign exchange market interventions by the Federal Reserve during 1973–1995 and the Glocker and Towbin quantitative DSGE model of reserve requirements in a small open economy with financial frictions.1 However, there are key links. Each study exami...

This paper takes the parameters in central bank loss functions as fundamental preferences to be estimated from the data. It is these preferences (along with target values) that define the policy regime in operation and that potentially change with senior central bank appointments. Optimizing central banks apply policy rules whose feedback coefficients are functions of its preferences. Consequen...