This paper studies banks' liquidity provision in the Lagos and Wright model of monetary exchanges. With aggregate uncertainty we show that banks sometimes exhaust their cash reserves and fail to satisfy their depositors' need of consumption smoothing. The banking panics can be eliminated by the...

The paper models the interaction between risk taking in the financial sector and central bank policy for the case of pure illiquidity risk. It is shown that, when bad states are highly unlikely, public provision of liquidity may improve the allocation, even though it encourages more risk taking...