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Journal of Finance Vol. 77 No. 3 2022

Resource Allocation in Bank Supervision: Trade‐Offs and Outcomes

Thomas M. Eisenbach; David O. Lucca; Robert M. Townsend

Abstract

We estimate a structural model of resource allocation on work hours of Federal Reserve bank supervisors to disentangle how supervisory technology, preferences, and resource constraints impact bank outcomes. We find a significant effect of supervision on bank risk and large technological scale economies with respect to bank size. Consistent with macroprudential objectives, revealed supervisory preferences disproportionately weight larger banks, especially post‐2008 when a resource reallocation to larger banks increased risk on average across all banks. Shadow cost estimates show tight resources around the financial crisis and counterfactuals indicate that binding constraints have large effects on the distribution of bank outcomes.

DOI
10.1111/jofi.13127
Volume
77
Issue
3
Pages
1685-1736
Language
en
Sources
bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

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