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We analyze small business lending at U.S. commercial banks, how it has changed over time and how it differs by bank size. Specifically, we examine the impact of government policy intervention on small business lending in the aftermath of the financial crisis. We find several important results. First, we find that the Troubled-Asset Relief Program's (TARP) $200 billion Capital Purchase Program (CPP) had little impact on the banks that received capital injections' small business lending. Second, the Small Business Loan Fund (SBLF) lending program appears to have been a success as banks participating in the loan fund increased their lending to small businesses. Finally, we find that financial turmoil had a substantial negative impact on lending to small businesses at community banks but not their large bank counterparts. This result suggests that the larger banks may have behaved in a manner consistent with too big to fail. Collectively, these results provide important insights for policy makers as they continue to deal with the credit access issues of small firms.

In contrast to the 1988 Basel Accord (Basel I), the revised risk-based capital standards (Basel II) propose regulatory capital requirements based on credit ratings. This paper develops a theoretical model to analyze how banks will adjust their low and high credit risk commercial loans under the proposed newer standard. Capital-constrained banks respond to an adverse capital shock by reducing high credit risk loans, while under certain circumstances, low credit risk loans may actually increase. When compared to Basel I, it is shown that high-risk loans are reduced more under Basel II, but whether a bank reduces total lending more under Basel I or under the revised standards depends on a complex interaction of factors.

Recent research suggests that long-term interest rate spreads provide information that can be useful in forecasting inflation, but that the spread between the three-month and six-month Treasury bill rates appears to have little forecasting ability. This paper uses the concepts of unit roots and cointegration to examine the failure of the short-term T-bill spread to forecast inflation. The results suggest that the interest rate spread has little forecasting value because inflation and the interest rate spread exhibit distinctly different time-series properties.

In recent decades, bank regulators have become increasingly reliant upon quantitative regulatory capital standards as a means of ensuring that banks hold adequate capital. The risk-based capital standards, from the 1988 Accord through the current Basel II standards, have primarily relied upon a building block approach to capital through the use of risk weights assigned to assets and off-balance sheet activities. Despite enhancements to improve the accuracy of risk-based capital standards, they continue to result in unintended consequences as the use of risk weights brings with it errors in the measurement of risk. Given the ongoing efforts by bank regulators to quantitatively assess risk, and correspondingly required capital, this study asks whether it is necessary for regulators to accurately assess risk weights in the risk-based capital standards. The simulation results suggest that, in order to minimize the unintended consequences associated with regulatory capital requirements, it is necessary for regulatory requirements to accurately mimic banks’ internal capital allocation processes.

This paper examines the impact that the Prompt Corrective Action (PCA) standards had on bank portfolios following the passage of FDICIA in 1991. To do this, the simultaneous equations model developed by Shrieves and Dahl (1992), and later modified by Jacques and Nigro (1997) to study the impact of risk-based capital, is used to examine how PCA simultaneously influenced bank capital ratios and portfolio risk levels. Unlike prior studies on this topic, by using a simultaneous equations model, the endogeneity of both capital and portfolio risk is explicitly recognized, and as such, the impact of possible changes in bank capital ratios on risk in a bank's portfolio can be examined.