Recent events have made it clear that the deposit insurance system is broken. We have a de jure cap on insurance set at $250,000 but, de facto, for any bank with at least $100 billion in assets, uninsured depositors are very unlikely to take losses. It is time for Congress to advance legislation...

This paper develops a search-theoretic model to study the interaction between banking and monetary policy and how this interaction affects the allocation and welfare. Regarding how banking affects the welfare costs of inflation: First, we find that, with banking, inflation generates smaller...

If firms borrow working capital to finance production, then nominal interest rates have a direct influence on inflation dynamics, which appears to be the case empirically. However, interest rates may only partly mirror the cost of working capital. In this paper we explore the role of bank...

The new liquidity risk regulation represents the chief innovation introduced by Basel III, following the regulator‘s intention to fix Basel II‘s omissions. We review the substitution effect set off on the bank‘s balance sheets by the new liquidity risk regulation, which dissuades the use...

Introducing shadow banks into the economy lowers the money supply measured as the sum of cash and deposits, while the amount of payment liquidity does not decrease as long as the liabilities of shadow banks remain fully liquid. At the same time, the total amount of credit available to firms...

A puzzle of China’s shadow banking system is its stark growth since the 2008 Subprime Crisis, which is in sharp contrast to most of countries. We present a model to explain why the shadow banking activities have been allowed to expand with the full awareness of regulators in China. In the...

This paper discusses recent bank runs in seven transition economies (Russia, Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania and Romania), comparing them against the older US experience and theoretical research. Bank runs seem to usually be information based. For example, improvements in bank...

At the time of publication, this article provided the most in-depth critique of capital account liberalization in any U.S. law journal. The article stemmed from a paper presented by the author to the Seventh Annual Conference of the United States-Mexico Law Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico on...

This article offers a critique of the deregulation of banking and finance that started with the breakdown of the Bretton Woods regime of fixed exchange rates during the Nixon administration, accelerated with interest rate deregulation during the Carter administration, and was deepened during the...

This paper uses branching and interstate banking deregulation as a natural experiment to explore the effect of agency cost on the use of bank loan commitments. A simple inventory-based model shows that lower agency cost facilitates more issuance of loan commitments because lower agency cost...