Banks are optimally opaque institutions. They produce debt for use as a transaction medium (bank money), which requires … that information about the backing assets - loans - not be revealed, so that bank money does not fluctuate in value …-insensitive assets. For the economy as a whole, firms endogenously separate into bank finance and capital market/stock market finance …

We develop a model of the joint capital structure decisions of banks and their borrowers. Strikingly high bank leverage … emerges naturally from the interplay between two sets of forces. First, seniority and diversification reduce bank asset … underlie our structural model, we can quantify the impact capital regulation and other government interventions have on bank …

When a bank experiences a negative shock to its equity, one way to return to target leverage is to sell assets. If … asset sales occur at depressed prices, then one bank's sales may impact other banks with common exposures, resulting in … explains how the distribution of bank leverage and risk exposures contributes to a form of systemic risk. We compute bank …