Academic research generates scholarly publications which practitioners do not read. Practitio-ners face challenges which scholars do not address. They speak different languages and move in different worlds. In a field now known as microfinance, this paper is a personal account of taking turns...

La recherche académique génère des publications spécialisées que les opérateurs de terrain ne lisent pas. Eux-mêmes font face à des défis que les universitaires n'étudient pas. Chercheurs et praticiens parlent des langages différents et vivent dans des mondes distincts. Cet article se...

We study the effects of a bank’s engagement in trading. Traditional banking is relationship-based: not scalable, long-term oriented, with high implicit capital, and low risk (thanks to the law of large numbers). Trading is transactions-based: scalable, short-term, capital constrained, and with...

This paper analyzes credit risk transfer in banking. Specifically, we model loan sales and loan insurance (e.g. credit default swaps) as the two instruments of risk transfer. Recent empirical evidence suggests that the adverse selection problem is as relevant in loan insurance as it is in loan...

We analyze the effect of counterparty risk on insurance contracts using the case of credit risk transfer in banking. In addition to the familiar moral hazard problem caused by the insuree's ability to influence the probability of a claim, this paper uncovers a new moral hazard problem on the...

In this paper, we argue for a regulatory framework under which a bank’s required level of equity capital depends on the equity capital of its peers. Such bankingon- the-average rules are transparent and could also be combined with the current regulatory framework. In addition, we argue that...

The paper provides a baseline model for regulatory analysis of systemic liquidity shocks. We show that banks may have an incentive to invest excessively in illiquid long term projects. In the prevailing mixed strategy equilibrium the allocation is inferior from the investor’s point of view...