Narrow Results

This paper models the effect of bank competition and deposit insurance premiums on the spread between lending and deposit rates. In developing economies, low spreads do not always indicate bank efficiency; they may be the result of high risk taking. This paper shows that imposing upper and lower limits on banks' spreads and adjusting deposit insurance premiums when violation of these limits occurs leads to a more stable but relatively large intermediation costs. In developing economies, such an outcome would be considered more desirable because it insulates existing financial intermediaries and investors against macroeconomic disturbances.

In this chapter, we propose the structural model in terms of the Stair Tree model and barrier option to evaluate the fair deposit insurance premium in accordance with the constraints of the deposit insurance contracts and the consideration of bankruptcy costs. First, we show that the deposit insurance model in Brockman and Turle (2003) is a special case of our model. Second, the simulation results suggest that insurers should adopt a forbearance policy instead of a strict policy for closure regulation to avoid losses from bankruptcy costs. An appropriate deposit insurance premium can alleviate potential moral hazard problems caused by a forbearance policy. Our simulation results can be used as reference in risk management for individual banks and for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).

In this article we review recent work on generalizations of the total time on test transform, and on stochastic orders that are based on these generalizations. Applications in economics, statistics, and reliability theory, are described as well.