This paper analyzes a government's incentives to provide fi nancial assistance to a public bank which is hit by a liquidity shock. We show that discretionary decisions about emergency liquidity assistance result in either excessively small or excessively large liquidity injections in a wide...

We comment on an article published in this journal by <link rid="b1">Hefeker (2003)</link> and reveal an inconsistency in his analysis of monetary policy in federal monetary unions. We clarify an implicit assumption in his model and show that even when this further assumption is met, <link rid="b1">Hefeker's (2003)</link> claim that a...