We report evidence that bank liquidity ratios (liquid assets as a percentage of total assets) decrease during the process of economic development. To reconcile this observation with the increasing importance of financial markets and the increasing direct participation of individual investors in...

How does the availability of alternative investment opportunities for banks' depositors affect the reaction of the banking system to aggregate liquidity shocks? And what are the implications, if any, for banking regulation? To answer these questions, I study a Diamond-Dybvig environment, where...

This paper analyzes the role of liquidity regulation and its interaction with capital requirements. We first introduce costly capital in a bank run model with endogenous bank portfolio choice and run probability, and show that capital regulation is the only way to restore the efficient...

Bank market power, both in the loan and deposit market, has important implications for credit provision and for financial stability. This article discusses these issues through the lens of a simple theoretical framework. On the asset side, banks choose the quality and quantity of loans. On the...

Loan guarantees represent a form of government intervention to support bank lending. However, their use raises concerns as to their effect on bank risk-taking incentives. In a model of financial fragility that incorporates bank capital and a bank incentive problem, we show that loan guarantees...