How does the belief that policymakers will bail out investors in the event of a crisis affect the allocation of resources and the stability of the financial system? I study this question in a model of financial intermediation with limited commitment. When a crisis occurs, the efficient policy...

I revisit the Diamond-Dybvig model of liquidity insurance in the presence of hidden trades. The key result is that in this environment deposit-taking banks are not necessary for the efficient provision of liquidity. Mutual funds are constrained efficient when supplemented with the same...

The government support of financial firms through direct assistance and programs to improve market liquidity during the worldwide financial crisis of 2007-2008 is unprecedented since the Great Depression. Whether a given firm is ex-ante ‘Too Big To Fail' in the mind of government agents is not...

This paper provides some general lessons for the design of counter-cyclical capital buffers. Its main empirical contribution is to analyze conditioning variables which could guide the build-up and release of capital. A major distinction for counter-cyclical capital schemes is whether...

Should policy makers be prevented from bailing out investors in the event of a crisis? I study this question in a model of financial intermediation with limited commitment. When a crisis occurs, the efficient policy response is to use public resources to augment the private consumption of those...

There is a longstanding debate about whether banking panics and other financial crises always have fundamental causes or are sometimes the result of self-fulfilling beliefs. Disagreement on this point would seem to present a serious obstacle to designing policies that promote financial...

We investigate liquidity shocks and shocks to fundamentals during financial crises at commercial banks, investment banks, and hedge funds. Liquidity shock amplification models assume that widespread funding problems cause fire sales. We find that most banks do not experience funding declines...

Articles 37(10) and 56-58 of Directive 2014/59/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council, of 15 May 2014, “establishing a framework for the recovery and resolution of credit institutions and investment firms (...)” (hereinafter the ‘BRRD') govern the provision of ‘extraordinary...

This paper analyzes the effects of government bailouts in a modified Diamond-Dybvig model. Following Keister (2010), my model includes both a private good and a public good. Bailouts are assumed to crowd out pub- lic good provision and improve the ex-post allocation of resources during a bank...

This paper studies how financial intermediation varies across banks. Bank size is a first-order determinant of banks' capital structure in the cross-section. Largest banks have the lowest capital-to-asset ratio and the lowest ratio of Tier-1 capital against risk-weighted assets. These large...