In the wake of the global financial crisis that erupted in 2008, there has been extensive commentary and regulatory focus on the 'Too Big to Fail' issue. In this paper, we survey the proposed solutions and regulatory initiatives that have been undertaken. We conduct a longitudinal analysis of...

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...

When policy makers have limited commitment power, self-fulfilling bank runs can arise as an equilibrium phenomenon. We study how such banking panics unfold in a version of the Diamond and Dybvig (1983) model. A run in this setting is necessarily partial, with only some depositors participating....

While the first two pillars of the European Banking Union have been implemented, a European deposit insurance scheme (EDIS) is still not in place. To facilitate its introduction, recent proposals argue in favor of a reinsurance scheme. In this paper, we use a regime-switching open-economy DSGE...

We provide a theory to investigate the implications of time-varying bailout policy for rational bubbles in an infinite-horizon production economy. In particular, we ask two questions. First, should the government bail out asset bubbles? Second, if yes, how? In our model, entrepreneurs face...

We study the interaction between a government's bailout policy and banks' willingness to impose losses on (or \bail in") their investors. The government has limited commitment and may choose to bail out banks facing large losses. The anticipation of this bailout undermines a bank's private...

Recent proposals for a still missing European deposit insurance scheme (EDIS) argue in favor of a reinsurance framework. In this paper, we use a regime-switching open-economy DSGE model with bank default to assess the relative efficiency of such a scheme. We find that reinsurance by EDIS is more...

Collapsing credit markets have been blamed for the depth and persistence of the Great Depression in the United States. Could similar mechanisms have played a role in ending the East Asian economic miracle - and in creating fragility in global financial markets? After a brief account of the...

We explore empirically how capital inflows into the US and financial deregulation within the United States interacted in driving the run-up (and subsequent decline) in US housing prices over the period 1990-2012. To obtain an ex ante measure of financial liberalization, we focus on the history...