Dwight B. Crane

The Global Financial System: A Functional Perspective

Leading financial scholars present essays examining the performance of the basic financial functions underlying global financial systems: payments, lending and investing, pooling funds, allocating risk, providing information, and dealing with incentive issues - with particular emphasis on how their performance is changing and implications for the future.

Bank mergers: Integration and profitability

The Treasury Departments 1991 recommendations for financial service reform would have allowed interstate branching by banks, eliminating the requirement that banking companies form a separate subsidiary for each state in which they do business. Supporters of the proposal argue that allowing bank holding companies to merge their subsidiary banks would improve performance. We tested this proposition by studying the before- and-after performance of all bank mergers in the New England states between 1982 and 1987. In the aggregate, merging banks did not achieve significant improvements in operating profits relative to other banks during the first two years after a merger. It is important to distinguish, however, between mergers of newly acquired banks and mergers of banks acquired earlier by the holding company. Mergers of previously acquired banks performed significantly better than mergers of newly acquired banks and, measured by operating return on assets, achieved significant performance improvements relative to the industry.

Managing Through Networks In Investment Banking

Investment bankers have developed management practices that are appropriate for their role in facilitating the flow of assets between issuers and investors. Flexible and dynamic network organizational structures enable firms to process unique deals and to adapt to changing circumstances. Client-oriented measurement systems emphasize the importance of serving customers to build market share in this service business. Rewards, in the form of large bonuses based on an assessment of an individuals contribution to collective outcomes, are a strong incentive for the needed high level of cooperation. The challenge for firms growing larger, more complex, and more geographically dispersed is to sustain these management practices. Commercial banks entering this business must learn a very different way of managing.

A Stochastic Programming Model for Commercial Bank Bond Portfolio Management

This paper presents a discrete stochastic programming model for commercial bank bond portfolio management. It differs from previous bond portfolio models in that it provides an optimization technique that explicitly takes into consideration the dynamic nature of the problem and that incorporates risk by treating future cash flows and interest rates as discrete random variables. The models data requirements and its computational demands are sufficiently limited so that it can be implemented as a normative aid to bond portfolio management. In addition, it can be extended by the addition of other asset and liability categories to serve as a more general model for commercial bank asset and liability management.

Doing Deals: Investment Banks at Work.

Doing Deals is an in-depth explanation of the unique management style of investment banks. Represented are insights drawn from 17 U.S. investment banks, 21 issuing customers, and 10 European financial institutions.

A DYNAMIC MODEL FOR BOND PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT

The bond portfolio problem is viewed as a multistage decision problem in which buy, sell, and hold decisions are made at successive (discrete) points in time. Normative models of this decision problem tend to become very large, particularly when its dynamic structure and the uncertainty of future interest rates and cash flows are incorporated in the model. In this paper we present a multiple period bond portfolio model and suggest a new approach for efficiently solving problems which are large enough to make use of as much information as portfolio managers can reasonably provide. The procedure utilizes the decomposition algorithm of mathematical programming and an efficient technique developed for solving subproblems of the overall portfolio model. The key to the procedure is the definition of subproblems which are easily solved via a simple recursive relationship.