Knowledge that Transforms

The focus of academic discussions of exchange rate policy has shifted in recent years. The new literature on exchange rate regime choice emphasizes considerations relating to the problems of credibility in exchange rate targeting and the connections between exchange rate regime choices and choices of monetary and fiscal policy. Arguments for exchange rate targeting are reviewed. Under most circumstances and for most countries, a system of freely floating exchange rates is likely to be a better choice than attempting to peg the exchange rate.

This paper argues that although financial consolidation creates some dangers because it is leading to larger institutions who might expose the US financial system to increased systemic risk, these dangers can be handled by vigilant supervision and a government safety net with an appropriate amount of constructive ambiguity. Financial consolidation also opens up opportunities to dramatically reduce the scope of deposit insurance and limit it to narrow bank accounts, thus substantially reducing the moral hazard created by the government safety net. Reducing the scope of deposit insurance, however, does not eliminate the need for a government safety net, and thus there is still a strong need for adequate prudential supervision of the financial system. Moving to a world in which we have larger, nationwide, diversified financial institutions and in which deposit insurance plays a very limited role, should improve the efficiency of the financial system. However, it is no panacea: the job of financial regulators and supervisors will continue to be highly challenging in the future.

This paper addresses the relationship between the aging process at new and relatively young banks and the tendency of banks to make loans to small businesses. Defining small business loans as C&I loans that are under $1 million in size, we analyze a sample of banks that had assets of less than $500 million in assets for the years 1993–1996 and that were 25 years of age or younger. We find, as have earlier studies, that banks' proclivities for small business lending are negatively related to their age and to their size. We proceed much farther, however, by introducing a number of additional explanatory variables, including the start-up year of the bank. We find that small business lending is negatively related to its being part of a MBHC. Also, small business lending is positively related to higher concentration rates in urban areas but is negatively related to higher concentration in rural areas. Despite the inclusion of these additional variables and a number of alternative specifications, the negative effects of a bank's age on its small business lending persist.

By many measures, bank consolidation waves, historically and currently, produce substantial efficiency gains associated with reduced operating costs, enhanced diversification, and the enrichment of bank-customer relationships. These gains may be hard to discover in panel or cross-sectional analyses of individual banks because merger waves pose special econometric pitfalls for event studies of stock returns and bank performance comparisons. We review these problems and summarize lessons from nine case studies of individual merger transactions which offer qualitative evidence that potential econometric pitfalls can be important. Those conclusions suggest placing greater weight on cross-regime comparisons for measuring gains during bank merger waves.

For nearly two decades banks in the US have consolidated in record numbers – in terms of both frequency and the size of the merging institutions. Rhoades (1996) (S.A. Rhoades, 1996. Bank Mergers and Industrywide Structure, 1980–1994. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Staff Study 169) hypothesizes that the main motivations were increased potential for geographic expansion created by changes in state laws regulating branching and a more favorable antitrust climate. To look for evidence of economic incentives to exploit these improved opportunities for consolidation, we examine how consolidation affects expected profit, the riskiness of profit, profit efficiency, market value, market-value efficiencies, and the risk of insolvency. Our estimates of expected profit, profit risk, and profit efficiency are based on a structural model of leveraged portfolio production that was estimated for a sample of highest-level US bank holding companies by Hughes et al. (1996) (Hughes et al., 1996. Efficient banking under interstate branching, Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking 28, 1045–1071.) Here, we also estimate two additional measures that gauge efficiency in terms of the market values of assets and of equity. Our findings suggest that the economic benefits of consolidation are strongest for those banks engaged in interstate expansion and, in particular, interstate expansion that diversifies banks’ macroeconomic risk. Not only do these banks experience clear gains in their financial performance, but society also benefits from the enhanced bank safety that follows from this type of consolidation.

This paper examines the relationship between mergers and acquisitions, efficiency, and scale economies in the US life insurance industry. We estimate cost and revenue efficiency over the period 1988–1995 using data envelopment analysis (DEA). The Malmquist methodology is used to measure changes in efficiency over time. We find that acquired firms achieve greater efficiency gains than firms that have not been involved in mergers or acquisitions. Firms operating with non-decreasing returns to scale (NDRS) and financially vulnerable firms are more likely to be acquisition targets. Overall, mergers and acquisitions in the life insurance industry have had a beneficial effect on efficiency.

Bank safety nets, originally proposed as a means of stabilizing financial systems, have become an important destabilizing influence. Government protection of bank debts encourages banks to undertake excessive risk, particularly in response to adverse shocks to asset values. Reforms that would remove the destabilizing moral hazard consequences of government protection are considered, both from the perspective of economic desirability and political feasibility. Requiring banks to maintain a minimal proportion of subordinated debt finance, and restricting the means by which government recapitalization of insolvent banks occurs are the central features of promising reforms to the safety net.

This article designs a framework for evaluating the causes, consequences, and future implications of financial services industry consolidation, reviews the extant research literature within the context of this framework (over 250 references), and suggests fruitful avenues for future research. The evidence is consistent with increases in market power from some types of consolidation; improvements in profit efficiency and diversification of risks, but little or no cost efficiency improvement on average; relatively little effect on the availability of services to small customers; potential improvements in payments system efficiency; and potential costs on the financial system from increases in systemic risk or expansion of the financial safety net.

We examine foreign acquisitions of United States banks around the time of the ownership change to determine whether the observed poor performance of foreign subsidiaries is the result of changes in business strategy or the preexisting characteristics of the target bank. We find that many of the problems were already present at the time of acquisition. However, changes in business strategy by the foreign owners were generally not successful in raising the bank’s performance level to that of its domestic peers.