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...

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...

Asian crisis in the late 1990s exposed the inherent deficiencies of Basel I, and exactly a decade later the 2008 global credit mayhem clearly proved that the Revised Framework (Basel II) and the IMF's Financial Sector Assessment Program contributed to instability rather than averting...

The paper investigates the effectiveness of dividend-based macro-prudential rules in complementing capital requirements to promote bank soundness and sustained lending over the cycle. First, some evidence on bank dividends and earnings in the euro area is presented. When shocks hit their...

Anticipating a bailout in the event of a crisis distorts a bank's incentives in multiple dimensions. Bailout payments can, for example, lead banks to issue too much short-term debt while simultaneously underinvesting in liquid assets. To correct these distortions, policymakers may choose to...

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...

The traditional approach to bank regulation, and notably to capital requirements, is based on microprudential cost-benefit analyses. The emphasis is, therefore, on rules that aim at ensuring that each and every banking firm is safe and sound. This note examines possible extensions of the...

This paper studies leverage regulation and monetary policy when equity investors and/or creditors have distorted beliefs relative to a planner. We characterize how the optimal leverage regulation responds to arbitrary changes in investors' and creditors' beliefs and relate our results to...