This book aims to provide a thoroughly updated overview and evaluation of the industrial organization of banking. It examines the interplay among bank behaviour, market structure, and regulation from the perspective of a variety of public policy issues, including bank competition and risk, market discipline, antitrust issues, and capital regulation. New to this edition are discussions of the economic foundations of international banking, macroprudential regulation, and international coordination of banking policies. The book can serve as a learning tool and reference for graduate students, academics, bankers, and policymakers with interests in the industrial organization of the banking sector and the impacts of banking regulations.

Federal deposit insurance may be "the single most destabilizing influence in the financial system," says economist Charles W. Calomiris in a new study published by AEI. Market discipline provides a better bank safety net than government insurance, he concludes. The Postmodern Bank Safety Net: Lessons from Developed and Developing Economies shows how government deposit insurance subsidizes the risks taken by banks. Weak banks deliberately and sometimes with impunity take on greater risks than they can afford. Undue risk-taking would not be tolerated were private market discipline brought to bear on banks, Calomiris argues. Market discipline would place the regulatory burden on sophisticated market participants with their own money at stake-a bank would survive only if it had investors, and those investors would be willing to risk their money only if they were able to evaluate the bank's risk. Currently, banks that hide loan losses can avoid paying increased deposit insurance costs. At the same time, Calomiris says, government regulators lack strong incentive to determine the true risk characteristics of bank assets-government regulators do not have their own money at stake and they face political pressure to maintain the credit supply. The results can be calamitous. In the 1970s and 1980s the Farm Credit System was increasingly willing to lend against questionable collateral while private banks withdrew from the market as lending risk increased. The system failed, gripping U.S. farmers in a debt crisis. Similarly, the savings and loan failures and the oil-related bank collapses in Texas and Oklahoma of the 19080s can be attributed to the failure of the bank safety net. And Chile, Mexico, and Japan have suffered financial collapses because their governments protected banks from self-inflicted losses.

This paper investigates the presence of depositor discipline in the U.S. banking sector. We test whether depositors penalize (discipline) banks for poor performance by withdrawing their uninsured deposits. While focusing on the movements in uninsured deposits, we also account for the possibility that banks may be forced to pay a risk premium in the form of higher interest rates to induce depositors not to withdraw their uninsured deposits. Our results support the existence of depositor discipline: a weak bank may not necessarily be able to stop a deposit drain by raising its uninsured deposit interest rates.

Dealing with all aspects of risk management that have undergone significant innovation in recent years, this book aims at being a reference work in its field. Different to other books on the topic, it addresses the challenges and opportunities facing the different risk management types in banks, insurance companies, and the corporate sector. Due to the rising volatility in the financial markets as well as political and operational risks affecting the business sector in general, capital adequacy rules are equally important for non-financial companies. For the banking sector, the book emphasizes the modifications implied by the Basel II proposal. The volume has been written for academics as well as practitioners, in particular finance specialists. It is unique in bringing together such a wide array of experts and correspondingly offers a complete coverage of recent developments in risk management.

This new and comprehensive database on the regulation and supervision of banks in 107 countries should better inform advice about bank ewgulation and supervision and lower the marginal cost of empirical research.