Following Diamond and Dybvig (1983), bank runs in the literature take the form of withdrawals of demand deposits payable in real goods, which deplete a fixed reserve of goods in the banking system. This paper examines modern bank runs, in which withdrawals typically take the form of wire...

Austrian banks have traditionally issued large volumes of Swiss franc-denominated loans. Although new issuance has virtually stopped since 2008, the outstanding volume (CHF 81 billion at mid-2012) will continue to pose a challenge to financial stability at least in the oming decade. This study...

The object of this paper is to analyze rigorously the role of a Lender of Last Resort by providing a framework where the distinction between insolvency and illiquidity is not clearly cut. Determining the optimal Lender of Last Resort policy requires a careful modeling of the structure of the...

Austrian banks have traditionally issued large volumes of Swiss franc-denominated loans. Although new issuance has virtually stopped since 2008, the outstanding volume (CHF 81 billion at mid-2012) will continue to pose a challenge to financial stability at least in the oming decade. This study...

The classical Bagehot’s conception of a Lender of Last Resort (LOLR) that lends to illiquid banks has been criticized on two grounds: on the one hand, the distinction between insolvency and illiquidity is not clear cut; on the other a fully collateralized repo market allows Central Banks to...

Central bank policy suffers from time-inconsistency when facing a banking crisis: A bailout is optimal ex post but ex ante it should be limited to control moral hazard. Dollarization provides a credible commitment not to help at the cost of not helping even when it would be ex ante optimal to do...

Historical evidence reveals no monocausal explanation for banking crises, including one which would emphasize the maintenance of a currency peg. To some extent this follows from the standard textbook wisdom: whether fixed or flexible exchange rates are preferable depends on the source of...

We study the credit supply effects of the unexpected freeze of the European interbank market, using exhaustive Portuguese loan-level data. We find that banks that rely more on interbank borrowing before the crisis decrease their credit supply more during the crisis. The credit supply reduction...