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Prior literature has analyzed determinants of housing appreciation rates at the regional level, including several studies on inter-regional differences. Generally, these previous studies have identified income, population shifts, and other demographic changes as the most im-portant factors in explaining regional price appreciation for single-family residential proper-ties. Existing literature has not considered the impact that regional industry concentration might have on regional housing appreciation. This study uses a Federal Housing Finance Ad-ministration price index, along with demographic and industry concentration data collected from the U.S. Census and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, to investigate whether a more or less highly concentrated industry base, as measured by a Herfindahl index, contributes to regional housing market performance. The questions of housing market impacts related to increasing concentration for a reasonably diversified metropolitan statistical area and impacts related to increasing diversification for an already-concentrated area are also examined.

The belief that some banks are too big to fail became reality during the financial crisis of 2007–2009 when the biggest banks in the United States were bailed out. Since then, big banks have grown much bigger and have become increasingly complex. This development has led to far greater attention on the need to resolve the too-big-to fail-problem. This paper examines the way in which the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation has resolved troubled banks over time and throughout the various regions of the nation. The paper also examines post-crisis regulatory reform by focusing on the new orderly liquidation authority the Dodd-Frank Act provides to the FDIC to serve as the receiver for big banks whose failure poses a significant risk to the country’s financial stability. We assess whether this process will indeed eliminate the too-big-to-fail problem.

This paper reassesses what works in banking regulation based on the new World Bank survey (Survey IV) of bank regulation and supervision around world. The paper briefly presents new and official survey information on bank regulations in more than 125 countries, makes comparisons with earlier surveys since 1999, and assesses the relationship between changes in bank regulations and banking system performance. The data suggest that many countries made capital regulations more stringent and granted greater discretionary power to official supervisory agencies over the past 12 years, but most countries have not enhanced the ability and incentives of private investors to monitor banks rigorously -- and several have weakened such private monitoring incentives. Although it is difficult to draw causal inferences from these data, and while there are material cross-country differences in the evolution of regulatory reforms, existing evidence suggests that many countries are making counterproductive changes to their bank regulations by not enhancing the ability and incentives of private investors to scrutinize banks.

James R. Barth, Peter Passell. Policy Matters 07-30. Dec 2007.

The General Agreement on Trade in Services (known as the GATS) is an important new element in the international framework that affects the regulation of every WTO Member's financial sector. However, except for a limited number of country-specific case studies, no attempt has been made to compare WTO commitments to open the domestic banking sector to foreign banks with actual regulatory practice in a systematic and comprehensive manner on a cross-country basis. Nor has much attention been devoted to systematically and comprehensively assess the degree to which WTO Members discriminate against foreign bank. This paper draws upon a new and comprehensive dataset consisting of the commitments countries made at the WTO and the regulations actually imposed on foreign banks by those countries. The dataset covers 123 WTO Members for whom there was also information available on their current regulatory regime for banking (based on the responses to a World Bank survey as discussed in Barth, Caprio, and Levine (2006)). On the basis of that data, the authors develop indices measuring the degree of openness to foreign banking based upon both commitments made and actual regulatory practice, with a view to assessing the overall extent to which countries open their borders to foreign banks more than they are legally obliged to do based upon their WTO commitments. The dataset is also used to assess the overall extent to which countries discriminate against foreign banks by regulating them less favorably than domestic banks. Although our results are still quite preliminary, they do show substantial divergences between commitments and practices. Indices of market openness and discrimination reveal wide differences among the 123 countries in the sample. The paper also identifies various factors that help explain the level of commitments that WTO Members have made.