We study the role of commitment in a version of the Diamond-Dybvig model with no aggregate uncertainty. As is well known, the banking authority can eliminate the possibility of a bank run by committing to suspend payments to depositors if a run were to start. We show, however, that in an...

In this paper, we address the question whether increasing households' financial market access improves welfare in a financial system in which there is intense competition among banks for private households' funds. Following earlier work by Diamond and by Fecht, we use a model in which the degree...

In the literature, bank runs take the form of withdrawals of real demand deposits that deplete a fixed reserve of goods in the banking system. This framework describes the type of bank run that has occurred historically in the United States and more recently in developing countries. However, in...

This paper explores sources of deposit dollarization unrelated to standard moral hazard arguments. We develop a model in which banks choose the optimal currency composition of their liabilities. We argue that the equal treatment of peso and dollar claims in the event of bank default can induce...

We find that banks charge more for overdraft credit when depositors have access to a potential substitute: deferred deposit ("payday") credit. We attribute this rise in prices partly to adverse selection created by banks' practice of charging a flat fee regardless of the overdraft...

Although small firms are most sensitive to interest rate and other shocks, empirical work on corporate risk management has focused instead on large public companies. This paper studies fixed-rate and adjustable-rate loans to see how small firms manage their exposure to interest rate risk. The...

While the world real interest rate is potentially an important mechanism for transmitting international shocks to small open economies, much of the recent quantitative research that studies this mechanism concludes that it has little effect on output, investment, and net exports. We reexamine...

This paper estimates the impact of monetary policy actions on bill, note, and bond yields, using data from the futures market for federal funds to separate changes in the target funds rate into anticipated and unanticipated components. Bond rates' response to anticipated changes is essentially...

We use a large matched sample of individual loans, borrowers, and banks to investigate whether bank financial health affects terms of lending, holding constant proxies for borrower risk and information costs. In particular, we focus on measuring effects of borrower and bank characteristics on...

The optimal prepayment model asserts that rational homeowners would refinance if they can reduce the current value of their liabilities by an amount greater than the refinancing threshold, defined as the cost of carrying the transaction plus the time value of the embedded call option. To compute...