Following the investment-cash flow literature, we test whether bank lending is constrained by the availability of insured deposits--a necessary condition for the existence of bank lending channel of monetary policy. We treat insured deposits as a type of "internal fund," similar to cash flows....

We find that banks charge more for overdraft credit when depositors have access to a potential substitute: deferred deposit ("payday") credit. We attribute this rise in prices partly to adverse selection created by banks' practice of charging a flat fee regardless of the overdraft...

We study the role of commitment in a version of the Diamond-Dybvig model with no aggregate uncertainty. As is well known, the banking authority can eliminate the possibility of a bank run by committing to suspend payments to depositors if a run were to start. We show, however, that in an...

In this paper, we address the question whether increasing households' financial market access improves welfare in a financial system in which there is intense competition among banks for private households' funds. Following earlier work by Diamond and by Fecht, we use a model in which the degree...

In the literature, bank runs take the form of withdrawals of real demand deposits that deplete a fixed reserve of goods in the banking system. This framework describes the type of bank run that has occurred historically in the United States and more recently in developing countries. However, in...

This paper explores sources of deposit dollarization unrelated to standard moral hazard arguments. We develop a model in which banks choose the optimal currency composition of their liabilities. We argue that the equal treatment of peso and dollar claims in the event of bank default can induce...

We consider the desirability of modifying a standard Taylor rule for a central bank's interest rate policy to incorporate either an adjustment for changes in interest rate spreads (as proposed by Taylor [2008] and McCulley and Toloui [2008]) or a response to variations in the aggregate volume of...

The empirical DSGE (dynamic stochastic general equilibrium) literature pays surprisingly little attention to the behavior of the monetary authority. Alternative policy rule specifications abound, but their relative merit is rarely discussed. We contribute to filling this gap by comparing the fit...

This paper examines how the scale and composition of public debt can affect economies that implement a combination of “passive” monetary policy and “active” fiscal policy. This policy configuration is argued to be of both historical and contemporary interest in the cases of the U.S. and...