This paper analyzes the private production of safe assets and its implications for financial stability. Financial intermediaries (FIs) originate loans, exert hidden effort to improve loan quality, and create safe assets by issuing debt backed by the safe payments from (i) their own loans and...

The paper argues that financial deregulation incentivized financial firms to take excessive risks and over-expand because it turned social insurance against systemic risk into a common pool (or open) resource. The increased size and complexity of deregulated financial markets in turn raised the...

We show that the impact of government bailouts (liquidity injections) on a representative bank's risk taking depends on the level of systematic risk of its loans portfolio. In a model where bank's output follows a geometric Brownian motion and the government guarantees bank's liabilities, we...

We consider a model of active asset management in which mutual fund managers exert unobservable effort to earn excess returns. Investors allocate capital to both actively managed funds and passively managed products (e.g., index funds or ETFs). In the model's equilibrium, investors are...

In a dynamic model of originate-to-distribute lending, we examine whether reputation concerns can incentivize a bank to monitor loans it has sold. Investors believe that banks with fewer recent loan defaults are more likely to monitor ("have higher reputation''). In equilibrium, banks monitor...

Contrary to public perception and previous literature on public bailout subsidies, we find over the recent 43-year period equityholders in big banks paid fairly for TBTF bailout insurance in terms of equity returns. In normal (non-crisis) periods, after TBTF in 1984, big banks pay an...

This paper extends Ghatak (1999)'s base model of group lending with asymmetric information by allowing individuals to differ both in their exogenous risk type and in their endogenous effort level. We find that joint liability leads to positive assortative matching in both a non-cooperative and a...

We show that the impact of government bailouts (liquidity injections) on a representative bank's risk taking depends on the level of systematic risk of its loans portfolio. In a model where bank's output follows a geometric Brownian motion and the government guarantees bank's liabilities, we...

This paper analyzes the effect of the removal of government guarantees on bank risk taking. We exploit the removal of guarantees for German Landesbanken which results in lower credit ratings, higher funding costs, and a loss in franchise value. This removal was announced in 2001, but...