When a firm is unable to roll over its debt, it may have to seek more expensive sources of financing or even liquidate its assets. This paper provides a normative analysis of minimizing such rollover risk, through the optimal dynamic choice of the maturity structure of debt. The objective of a...

Higher capital ratios are unlikely to prevent a financial crisis. This is empirically true both for the entire history of advanced economies between 1870 and 2013 and for the post-WW2 period, and holds both within and between countries. We reach this startling conclusion using newly collected...

We study a modification of the Diamond and Dybvig (1983) model in which the bank may hold a liquid asset, some depositors see sunspots that could lead them to run, and all depositors have incomplete information about the bank's ability to survive a run. The incomplete information means that the...

Both investors and borrowers are concerned about liquidity. Investors desire liquidity because they are uncertain about when they will want to eliminate their holding of a financial asset. Borrowers are concerned about liquidity because they are uncertain about their ability to continue to...

Since August 1995, Japanese banks have had to pay a premium on Eurodollar and Euroyen interbank loans relative to their U.S. and U.K. competitors. This so-called Japan premium' provides a market indicator of investor anxiety about the ability of Japanese banks to repay loans. We examine the...

Available studies on asymmetries in the monetary transmission mechanism within Europe are invariably based on macro-economic evidence: such evidence is abundant but often contradictory. This paper takes a different route by using micro-economic data. We use the information contained in the...

We present a tractable dynamic macroeconomic model of self-fulfilling bank runs. A bank is vulnerable to a run when a loss of investors' confidence triggers deposit withdrawals and leads the bank to default on its obligations. We analytically characterize how the vulnerability of an individual...

We consider bank panic models in which, depending on the configuration of fundamentals, there can be a positive probability of a bank panic. A crucial assumption in these models is that new equity cannot enter in a panic. We quantify the importance of this assumption by computing the minimal...

In March 2020, the Federal Reserve eased the terms on its standing swap lines in collaboration with other central banks, reactivated temporary swap agreements, and then introduced the new Foreign and International Monetary Authorities (FIMA) repo facility. We provide new evidence on how the...