Most analyses of banking crises assume that banks use real contracts but in practice contracts are nominal. We consider a standard banking model with aggregate return risk, aggregate liquidity risk and idiosyncratic liquidity shocks. With non-contingent nominal deposit contracts, a decentralized...

Relationships between intermediaries and their customers have become increasingly important in recent years. This paper argues that the need for costly ex ante information acquisition and analysis is a major barrier to the participation of investors and firms in sophisticated markets. Long-term...

We develop a simple model of the interbank market where banks trade a long term, safe asset. When there is a lack of opportunities for banks to hedge idiosyncratic and aggregate liquidity shocks, the interbank market is characterized by excessive price volatility. In such a situation, a central...

In an overlapping generations economy with (incomplete) financial markets but no intermediaries, there is underinvestment in safe assets. In an economy with intermediaries and no financial markets, accumulating reserves of save assets allows returns to be smoothed, nondiversifiable risk to be...

Competition policy in the banking sector is complicated by the necessity of maintaining financial stability. Greater competition may be good for (static) efficiency, but bad for financial stability. From the point of view of welfare economics, the relevant question is: what are the efficient...

Traditional asset-pricing theories assume complete market participation, despite considerable empirical evidence that most investors participate in a limited number of markets. The authors show that once the participation decision is endogenized, market properties change dramatically. First,...

A complex financial system comprises both financial markets and financial intermediaries. We distinguish financial intermediaries according to whether they issue complete contingent contracts or incomplete contracts. Intermediaries such as banks that issue incomplete contracts, e.g., demand...