Decision-making during the credit crisis: Did the Treasury let commercial banks fail?
Ettore Croci,
Gerard Hertig and
Eric Nowak
Journal of Empirical Finance, 2016, vol. 38, issue PA, 476-497
Abstract:
Limited attention has been paid to the comparative fate of banks benefiting from Capital Purchase Program (CPP) funding and less fortunate banks subject to FDIC resolution. We address this omission by investigating two core issues. One is whether commercial banks that ended up being subject to FDIC resolution received CPP funds. The other is whether the non-allocation of CPP funds made FDIC receivership more likely for viable commercial banks. Our findings show almost no overlap between CPP-funded and FDIC-resolved commercial banks, but we provide evidence that a significant number of FDIC-resolved banks could have avoided receivership if they had been allocated CPP funding. By comparing estimated funding and resolution costs we also show that bailing out more banks would have been cost-efficient. While our results do not allow for any policy suggestion on the optimality of bailouts per se, they suggest that once a bailout program is already on the table, it is better to err on the side of rescuing too many rather than too few banks.
Keywords: Bankruptcy; Bailout; Commercial bank; CPP; Financial crisis; Resolution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G21 G28 G33 K23 K29 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0927539816000025
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:empfin:v:38:y:2016:i:pa:p:476-497
DOI: 10.1016/j.jempfin.2016.01.001
Access Statistics for this article
Journal of Empirical Finance is currently edited by R. T. Baillie, F. C. Palm, Th. J. Vermaelen and C. C. P. Wolff
More articles in Journal of Empirical Finance from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().