This paper incorporates banks and banking panics within a conventional macroeconomic framework to analyze the dynamics of a financial crisis of the kind recently experienced. We are particularly interested in characterizing the sudden and discrete nature of the banking panics as well as the...

We introduce liquidity frictions into an otherwise standard DSGE model with nominal and real rigidities, explicitly incorporating the zero bound on the short-term nominal interest rate. Within this framework, we ask: Can a shock to the liquidity of private paper lead to a collapse in short-term...

We develop a model of banking crises which Is consistent with two important features of the data: First, banking crises are usually preceded by credit booms. Second, credit booms often do not result in a crisis. That is, there are "good" booms as well as "bad" booms in the language of Gorton and...