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This paper assesses potential diversification benefits in the U.S. banking industry from the steady shift toward activities that generate fee income, trading revenue, and other types of noninterest income. In the aggregate, declining volatility of net operating revenue reflects reduced volatility of net interest income, not diversification benefits from noninterest income, which is quite volatile and increasingly correlated with net interest income. At the bank level, greater reliance on noninterest income, particularly trading revenue, is associated with lower risk-adjusted profits and higher risk. This suggests few obvious diversification benefits from the ongoing shift toward noninterest income.

This paper examines the link between information technology (IT) and the US productivity revival in the late 1990s. Industry-level data show a broad productivity resurgence that reflects both the production and the use of IT. The most IT-intensive industries experienced significantly larger productivity gains than other industries and a wide variety of econometric tests show a strong correlation between IT capital accumulation and labor productivity. To quantify the aggregate impact of IT-use and IT-production, a novel decomposition of aggregate labor productivity is presented. Results show that virtually all of the aggregate productivity acceleration can be traced to the industries that either produce IT or use IT most intensively, with essentially no contribution from the remaining industries that are less involved in the IT revolution.

It is widely recognized that information technology was critical to the dramatic acceleration of U.S. labor productivity growth in the mid 1990s. This paper traces the evolution of productivity estimates to document how and when this perception emerged. Early studies concluded that information technology was relatively unimportant. Only after the massive information technology investment boom of the late 1990s did this investment and underlying productivity increases in the information technology–producing sectors come to be identified as important sources of growth. Although information technology has diminished in significance since the dot-com crash of 2000 and observed growth rates have slowed recently, we project that private sector productivity growth will average around 2.4 percent per year for the next decade, only moderately below the average of the post-1995 period.

This paper examines the declining volatility of U.S. output growth from a production perspective. At the aggregate level, increased output stability reflects decreased volatility in both labor productivity growth and hours growth, as well as a significant decline in the covariance. The decline in output volatility can also be traced to less volatile labor input and total factor productivity growth and the smaller covariance between them. At the industry level, the decline in volatility appears widespread, with about 80% of component industries showing smaller contributions to aggregate output volatility after 1984, although most of the aggregate decline reflects smaller covariances between industries. There is also strong evidence of a decline in the correlation between hours and labor productivity growth across industries. The paper concludes with a discussion of potential explanations.

This paper examines the link between diversification and risk-adjusted performance for small community banks. The results show diversification benefits within broad activity classes, but not between them. Specific business lines are linked with very different ex post outcomes, however, so the mix of activities is also important. In particular, an increased focus on noninterest income-generating activities is associated with declines in risk-adjusted performance, as are commercial and industrial lending and trading. This is a potential dark side of the search to diversify as managers may enter businesses where they have little experience or comparative advantage. A final set of results shows significant differences in the determinants of risk-adjusted performance for community banks relative to larger banks, which suggests that a competitive opportunity remains for community banks. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

Analyzes data from revision of the US national income and product accounts (NIPAs), focusing on role of information technology; proposes upward revision of intermediate-term projections of future growth; with comments.

This paper examines the impact of increased competition from deregulation on the dynamics of the U.S. banking industry. We find the link between a bank's relative performance and its subsequent market share growth strengthens significantly after deregulation as competitive reallocation effects transfer assets to better performers. Exit dynamics also change in ways consistent with the disciplinary role of competition. The net effect is a substantial reallocation of market share toward better banks. We conclude that earlier regulation of U.S. banks blunted this market mechanism and seriously hindered the competitive process.

This paper uses a portfolio framework to evaluate the impact of increased noninterest income on equity market measures of return and risk of U.S. bank holding companies from 1997 to 2004. The results indicate that the banks most reliant on activities that generate noninterest income do not earn higher average equity returns, but are much more risky as measured by return volatility (both total and idiosyncratic) and market betas. This suggests that the pervasive shift toward noninterest income has not improved the risk/return outcomes of U.S. banks in recent years.

This paper uses equity returns for publicly traded US bank holding companies (BHCs) from 1997 to 2004 to identify the determinants of risk, measured by equity market volatility, and examine how they have evolved. The results indicate that balance sheet items such as commercial and industrial loans and consumer lending and income statement items such as other noninterest income drive the cross-sectional differences in BHC risk. Newly mandated regulatory data on the components of other noninterest income show that investment banking, servicing, securitization income, gains from loan sales, gains other asset sales, and other noninterest income are particularly volatile activities. This highlights the value of increased transparency as a means to improve market discipline and reduce the opacity of complex financial institutions. Finally, in the years after 2000, the locus of risk has shifted off of the balance sheet and onto the income statement as investors identify the new risks associated with evolving and expanding bank activities. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

This paper examines the evolution of productivity in U.S. manufacturing plants from 1963 to 1992. We define a vintage effect as the change in productivity of recent cohorts of new plants relative to earlier cohorts of new plants, and a survival effect as the change in productivity of a particular cohort of surviving plants as it ages. Both factors contribute to industry productivity growth, but play offsetting roles in determining a cohorts relative position in the productivity distribution. Recent cohorts enter with higher productivity than earlier entrants did, whereas surviving cohorts show productivity increases as they age. These two effects roughly offset each other, however, so there is a rough convergence in productivity across cohorts in 1992 and 1987.