Should policy makers be permitted to intervene during a financial crisis by bailing out financial institutions and their investors? We study this question in a model that incorporates two competing views about the underlying causes of these crises: self-fulfilling shifts in investors'...

We study the Green and Lin (2003) model of financial intermediation with two new features: traders may face a cost of contacting the intermediary, and consumption needs may be correlated across traders. We show that each feature is capable of generating an equilibrium in which some (but not all)...

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...

In this paper we extend the Cooper and Ross (1998) analysis of the optimal response of a competitive bank to the possibility of a bank run. If the probability of a run is small, the bank will offer a contract that admits a bank-run equilibrium. We show that, in this case, the bank will hold a...