What ties together the traditional commercial banking activities of deposittaking and lending? We argue that since banks often lend via commitments, their lending and deposit-taking may be two manifestations of one primitive function: the provision of liquidity on demand. There will be synergies between the two activities to the extent that both require banks to hold large balances of liquid assets: If deposit withdrawals and commitment takedowns are imperfectly correlated, the two activities can share the costs of the liquid-asset stockpile. We develop this idea with a simple model, and use a variety of data to test the model empirically. WHAT ARE THE DEFINING CHARACTERISTICS of a bank? Both the legal definition in the United States and the standard answer from economists is that commercial banks are institutions that engage in two distinct types of activities, one on each side of the balance sheet—deposit-taking and lending. More precisely, deposit-taking involves issuing claims that are riskless and demandable, that is, claims that can be redeemed for a fixed value at any time. Lending involves acquiring costly information about opaque borrowers, and extending credit based on this information. A great deal of theoretical and empirical analysis has been devoted to understanding the circumstances under which each of these two activities might require the services of an intermediary, as opposed to being implemented in arm’s-length securities markets. While much has been learned from this work, with few exceptions it has not addressed a fundamental question: why is it important that one institution carry out both functions * Kashyap and Rajan are from the University of Chicago and Stein is from Harvard University. We thank Eric Bettinger, Qi Chen, and Jeremy Nalewaik for excellent research assistance, and Melissa Cunniffe and Ann Richards for help in preparing the manuscript. We are also grateful for helpful comments from Gary Gorton, George Pennacchi, René Stulz, the referee,

Systemic risk is modeled as the endogenously chosen correlation of returns on assets held by banks. The limited liability of banks and the presence of a negative externality of one bank's failure on the health of other banks give rise to a systemic risk-shifting incentive where all banks undertake correlated investments, thereby increasing economy-wide aggregate risk. Regulatory mechanisms such as bank closure policy and capital adequacy requirements that are commonly based only on a bank's own risk fail to mitigate aggregate risk-shifting incentives, and can, in fact, accentuate systemic risk. Prudential regulation is shown to operate at a collectivelevel, regulating each bank as a function of both its joint (correlated) risk with other banks as well as its individual (bank-specific) risk.

It is now an accepted fact that stochastic mortality – the risk that actual future trends in mortality might differ from those anticipated – is an important risk factor in both life insurance and pensions. As such it affects how fair values, premium rates, and risk reserves are calculated. This paper makes use of the similarities between the force of mortality and interest rates to show how we can model mortality risks and price mortality-related instruments using adaptations of the arbitrage-free pricing frameworks that have been developed for interest-rate derivatives. In so doing, it develops a range of arbitragefree (or risk-neutral) frameworks for pricing and hedging mortality risk that allow for both interest and mortality factors to be stochastic. The different frameworks that we describe – short-rate models, forward-mortality models, positive-mortality models and mortality market models – are all based on positive-interest-rate modelling frameworks since the force of mortality can be treated in a similar way to the short-term risk-free rate of interest. These frameworks can be applied to a great variety of mortality-related instruments, from vanilla survivor bonds to exotic mortality derivatives.

Abstract The credit derivatives market provides a liquid but opaque forum for secondary market trading of banking assets. I show that when entrepreneurs rely upon the certification value of bank debt to obtain cheap bond market finance, the existence of a credit derivatives market may cause them to issue sub-investment grade bonds instead, and to engage in second-best behaviour. Credit derivatives can therefore cause disintermediation and thus reduce welfare.

Banks and other lenders often transfer credit risk in order to liberate capi-tal for further loan intermediation. Beyond selling loans outright, lenders are increasingly active in the markets for syndicated loans, collateralized loan obliga-tions (CLOs), credit default swaps, credit derivative product companies, “spe-cialty finance companies, ” and other financial innovations designed for credit risk transfer. My purpose here is to explore the design, prevalence, and effec-tiveness of credit risk transfer. My focus will be the costs and benefits for the efficiency and stability of the financial system. In addition to allowing lenders to conserve costly capital, credit risk transfer can improve financial stability by smoothing out the risks among many investors.

We test how active management of bank credit risk exposure through the loan sales market affects capital structure, lending, profits, and risk. We find that banks that rebalance their loan portfolio exposures by both buying and selling loans – that is, banks that use the loan sales market for risk management purposes rather than to alter their holdings of loans – hold less capital than other banks; they also make more risky loans (loans to businesses) as a percentage of total assets than other banks. Holding size, leverage and lending activities constant, banks active in the loan sales market have lower risk and higher profits than other banks. Our results suggest that banks that improve their ability to manage credit risk may operate with greater leverage and may lend more of their assets to risky borrowers. Thus, the benefits of advances in risk management in banking may be greater credit availability, rather than reduced risk in the banking system.

the problems and opportunities facing the financial services industry in its search for competitive excellence. The Center's research focuses on the issues related to managing risk at the firm level as well as ways to improve productivity and performance. The Center fosters the development of a community of faculty, visiting scholars and Ph.D. candidates whose research interests complement and support the mission of the Center. The Center works closely with industry executives and practitioners to ensure that its research is informed by the operating realities and competitive demands facing industry participants as they pursue competitive excellence. Copies of the working papers summarized here are available from the Center. If you would like to learn more about the Center or become a member of our research community, please let us know of your interest.

An originate-to-distribute (OTD) model of lending, where the originator of a loan sells it to various third parties, was a popular method of mortgage lending before the onset of the subprime mortgage crisis. We show that banks with high involvement in the OTD market during the pre-crisis period originated excessively poor-quality mortgages. This result is not explained away by differences in observable borrower quality, geographical location of the property, or the cost of capital of high- and low-OTD banks. Instead, our evidence supports the view that the originating banks did not expend resources in screen-ing their borrowers. The effect of OTD lending on poor mortgage quality is stronger for capital-constrained banks. Overall, we provide evidence that lack of screening incentives coupled with leverage-induced risk-taking behavior significantly contributed to the current subprime mortgage crisis. (JEL G11, G12, G13, G14) The recent crisis in the mortgage market is having an enormous impact on the world economy. While the popular press has presented a number of anecdotes and case studies, a body of academic research is fast evolving to understand the precise causes and consequences of this crisis (see Greenlaw et al. 2008;

: We model the equilibrium price and quantity of risk transfer between firms and financial intermediaries. Value-maximizing firms have downward sloping demands to cede risk, while intermediaries, who assume risk, provide less-than-fully-elastic supply. We show that equilibrium required returns will be "high" in the presence of financing imperfections that make intermediary capital costly. Moreover, financing imperfections can give rise to intermediary market power, so that small changes in financial imperfections can give rise to large changes in price. We develop tests of this alternative against the null that the supply of intermediary capital is perfectly elastic. We take the US catastrophe reinsurance market as an example, using detailed data from Guy Carpenter & Co., covering a large fraction of the catastrophe risks exchanged during 1970-94. Our results suggest that the price of reinsurance generally exceeds "fair" values, particularly in the aftermath of large events, ...

This paper presents a dynamic model of optimal bank capital in which the bank optimizes over costs associated with failure, holding capital, and flows of external capital. The solution to the infinite-horizon optimization problem is related to period-by-period value-at-risk (var) in which the optimal probability of failure is endogenously determined. Over a cycle, var is positively correlated with optimal flows of external capital, but negatively correlated with optimal net changes in capital and the optimal level of total capital. Thus, a regulatory minimum requirement based on var, if binding, is likely to be procyclical. The model suggests several ways of reducing this problem. For example, a var-based requirement makes more sense if it is applied to external capital flows than if it is applied to the total level of capital. Call report data suggest that U.S. commercial bank behavior since 1984 is consistent with the model.