We study the functioning and possible breakdown of the interbank market in the presence of counterparty risk. We allow banks to have private information about the risk of their assets. We show how banks' asset risk affects funding liquidity in the interbank market. Several interbank market...

When banks have an informational monopoly about their borrowers, the latter incentives can be thwarted by the fear that the return on their effort will be partly appropriated by their banks via high future interest rates. Banks can correct this incentive problem through a commitment to share...

This paper studies the impact of competition on the determination of interest rates, and on banks’ risk taking behaviour, under different assumptions about deposit insurance and the dissemination of financial information. We find that lower entry costs foster competition in deposit rates and...

Deposit insurance schemes are becoming increasingly popular around the world and yet there is little understanding of how they should be designed and what their consequences are. In this Paper we provide a new rationale for the provision of deposit insurance. We analyse a model in which agents...

We investigate whether information sharing among banks has affected credit market performance in the transition countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, using a large sample of firm-level data. Our estimates show that information sharing is associated with improved availability...

This Paper explains both the onset of the financial crisis in 1998 and the striking economic recovery afterwards in Russia and other Former Soviet Union (FSU) economies. Before the crisis banks do not lend to the real sector of the economy, and firms use non-bank finance - including trade...

Theory predicts that information sharing among lenders attenuates adverse selection and moral hazard, and can therefore increase lending and reduce default rates. To test these predictions, we construct a new international data set on private credit bureaus and public credit registers. We find...

We consider a financing game with costly enforcement based on Townsend (1979), but where monitoring is non-contractible and allowed to be stochastic. Debt is the optimal contract. Moreover, the debt contract induces creditor leniency and strategic defaults by the borrower on the equilibrium...

We present a model in which issuers of asset backed securities choose to release coarse information to enhance the liquidity of their primary market, at the cost of reducing secondary market liquidity or even causing it to freeze. The degree of transparency is inefficiently low if the social...

We study the welfare implications of market power in a model where banks choose between credit rationing and monitoring in order to alleviate an underlying moral-hazard problem. We show that the effect of banks’ market power on social welfare is the result of two countervailing effects. On the...