CALL FOR PAPERS 12th Annual Bank Research Conference, Octobe

[admin]

CALL FOR PAPERS 12th Annual Bank Research Conference, October 11-12, 2012

Performance of Financial Services in the Current Environment

Jointly organized by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s Center for Financial Research and the Journal of Financial Services Research (JFSR)
The FDIC’s Center for Financial Research and the JFSR invite submissions for the 121h Annual Fall Research Conference to be held in Arlington, Virginia on Thursday October 11, and Friday October 12, 2012.

The current financial environment offers new challenges and opportunities for banks and other financial service providers. The environment includes a prolonged period of low interest rates and newly fortified regulation. There is ongoing debate about whether low interest rates encourage financial institution risk-taking, but the environment clearly creates challenges for pension funds, insurance institutions, banks, money market funds and perhaps other financial service providers. New technologies and regulations have impacted transactions processing and derivatives clearing and settlement arrangements. Securitization activities have yet to rebound and rule making is still pending. Recent events have identified the need for additional resources in mortgage servicing activities.

What is the long-run outlook for the performance of the financial sector? Did the financial sector grow too large and, if so, will the industry retrench. How? Will industry structure have to adapt and innovate to meet the challenges of the current environment? Will fee-based services replace spreads as the source of profit? Are investors myopic and continue demanding historical rates of return? Have institutions adapted to the new environment and lowered their acceptable target rates of return? Have compensation practices changed to improve safety net related agency issues? Does the environment create promising new opportunities for financial service and product providers? The 12th Annual FDIC-JFSR Fall Bank Research Conference invites theoretical and empirical papers focusing on the analysis of factors that influence financial sector performance including, but not limited to:

Financial system fragility
Asset quality and underwriting practices
RAROC hurdle rates and project evaluation processes
Non interest and fee income sources
Capital and liquidity regulation
Funding innovations
Information disclosure
New products
Innovations in the provision of existing services and processes
Industry responses to new regulations
Industry trends in competition and structure
Corporate governance and compensations practices and trends

The 12th Annual FDIC-JFSR conference will provide a forum to discuss these issues.
Expenses for travel and lodging will be reimbursed for paper presenters. Papers must be received by July 15, 2012. Authors will be notified about the status of their papers by August 15, 2012. Please submit papers as “pdf” attachments to an email sent to CFR@fdic.gov. Please name the file: “YourLastName.pdf.”
For additional information, please contact the conference organizers: Paul Kupiec (202) 898-6768 (pkupiec@fdic.gov) or Haluk Unal (301) 405–2256 (hunal@rhsmith.umd.edu).