Because of secrecy, little is known about the political economy of central bank lending. Utilizing a novel, hand-collected historical daily dataset on loans to commercial banks, we analyze how personal connections matter for lending of last resort, highlighting the importance of governance for...

We examine how financial crises redistribute risk, employing novel empirical methods and micro data from the largest financial crisis of the 20th century - the Great Depression. Using balance-sheet and systemic risk measures at the bank level, we build an econometric model with incidental...

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...

This paper studies the role of a lender of last resort (LLR) in a monetary model where a shortage of bank's monetary reserves (or a banking panic) occurs endogenously. We show that while a discount window policy introduced by the LLR is welfare improving, it reduces the banks' ex ante incentive...

This paper studies the role of a lender of last resort (LLR) in a monetary model where a shortage of a bank's monetary reserves (a liquidity crisis) occurs endogenously. We show that discount window lending by the LLR is welfare-improving but reduces banks' ex-ante incentive to hold monetary...

This paper explores the impacts on an economy of a central bank changing the size and composition of its balance sheet. One of the ways in which such asset purchases could influence prices and demand is via portfolio balance effects. We develop and calibrate a simple OLG model in which...

We examine evidence for a systematic underperformance of Germany's state-owned banks in the current financial crisis and study if the bank losses can be traced to the quality of bank governance. For this purpose, we examine the biographical background of 593 supervisory board members in the 29...

Does enhanced shareholder liability reduce bank failure? We compare the performance of around 4,200 state-regulated banks of similar size in neighboring U.S. states with different liability regimes during the Great Depression. The distress rate of limited liability banks was 29% higher than that...

An increasing number of central banks implement monetary policy via two standing facilities: a lending facility and a deposit facility. In this paper we show that it is socially optimal to implement a non-zero interest rate spread. We prove this result in a dynamic general equilibrium model...