Knowledge that Transforms

During the 1980s, insolvency of individual thrifts and the thrift deposit insurer created severe incentive problems. Lacking cash to close insolvent thrifts, regulators induced nearly $10 billion of private capital to flow into the industry through mutual-to-stock conversions. We test a theory of how regulators encouraged capital-impaired mutual thrifts to convert by permitting them to pay dividends rather than rebuild capital. We estimate the costs of this policy and interpret the 1991 Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act as requiring regulators to impose restraints on depository institutions parallel to debt covenants that prevent capital distributions by nonfinancial firms experiencing distress.

We generalize the model of Ferguson and Peters (1995) to allow for unequal recovery rates in the event of default by majority borrowers versus minority borrowers. This simple extension has two direct implications: (i) a uniform credit policy, as defined by Ferguson and Peters, entails cross-subsidization across groups; and (ii) it is possible for a profit-maximizing (and therefore economically nondiscriminatory) lending policy to generate lower average default rates among minority borrowers than among majority borrowers.