Furthermore, if the effects of regulations on user costs are excluded, it is impossible to analyze monetary policy effects. Chapter 2 examines the principal areas of regulation that affect user costs. For example, reserve requirements, as administered by the Federal Reserve, act as a tax on financial firms so covered. Required reserves earn no return to the financial firm and there is foregone revenue. Deposit insurance increases the user cost of servicing deposits to the banks. Interest rate regulations place limits on interest rates on time de posits, or prohibit payments on demand deposits during part of the period studied. Underlying all these are the open market operations of the Federal Reserve, and their effects on interest rates and the quantities of financial goods. Chapter 2 reveals that previous work on the estimation of bank tech nologies is incomplete, and that the regulations require modelling as a part of the profit maximizing structure. 1.3 User Cost Derivation Chapter 3 discusses the construction of user costs. These are derived for the services from all assets or liabilities on a bank balance sheet or appearing on the income statement. The user cost formulation permits goods to be classified as outputs and inputs. Those with a positive user cost, where expenditures per unit exceed revenues per unit, are inputs. The unit for financial goods such as loans or deposits is one dollar per period. Goods with a negative user cost, with expenditures falling below revenue per unit, are outputs."

Furthermore, if the effects of regulations on user costs are excluded, it is impossible to analyze monetary policy effects. Chapter 2 examines the principal areas of regulation that affect user costs. For example, reserve requirements, as administered by the Federal Reserve, act as a tax on financial firms so covered. Required reserves earn no return to the financial firm and there is foregone revenue. Deposit insurance increases the user cost of servicing deposits to the banks. Interest rate regulations place limits on interest rates on time de posits, or prohibit payments on demand deposits during part of the period studied. Underlying all these are the open market operations of the Federal Reserve, and their effects on interest rates and the quantities of financial goods. Chapter 2 reveals that previous work on the estimation of bank tech nologies is incomplete, and that the regulations require modelling as a part of the profit maximizing structure. 1.3 User Cost Derivation Chapter 3 discusses the construction of user costs. These are derived for the services from all assets or liabilities on a bank balance sheet or appearing on the income statement. The user cost formulation permits goods to be classified as outputs and inputs. Those with a positive user cost, where expenditures per unit exceed revenues per unit, are inputs. The unit for financial goods such as loans or deposits is one dollar per period. Goods with a negative user cost, with expenditures falling below revenue per unit, are outputs."

Much research is needed to implement a supervisory surveillance system for banking organizations that relies on subordinated debt and other market data. This paper is germane to that task. We find subordinated debt spreads are most consistent across data sources for the most liquid bonds (i.e., those of relatively large issuance size, relatively young age, issued by relatively large firms) traded in a relatively robust overall bond market. We also find there is a high degree of concordance in rankings of firms by their minimum spreads across bonds with especially strong agreement about which large firms are in the tails of the spread distribution at each point in time. Our time-series results support and provide guidance for the use of subordinated debt spreads in supervisory monitoring, support the need for careful judgment when interpreting such spreads, highlight difficulties with currently available data sources, and motivate the need for further research.