A fixed-rate deposit insurance system provides a moral hazard for excessive risk taking and is not viable absent regulation. Although the deposit insurance system appears to have worked remarkably well over most of its 50-year history, major problems began to appear in the early 1980s. This...

We introduce a monopolistically-competitive model of foreign lending in which both explicit and implicit fixed-premium deposit insurance increase the degree to which bank participation in relending to problem debtors falls below its globally optimal level. This provides a channel for...