There is a longstanding debate about whether banking panics and other financial crises always have fundamental causes or are sometimes the result of self-fulfilling beliefs. Disagreement on this point would seem to present a serious obstacle to designing policies that promote financial...

How does the belief that policymakers will bail out investors in the event of a crisis affect the allocation of resources and the stability of the financial system? I study this question in a model of financial intermediation with limited commitment. When a crisis occurs, the efficient policy...

I revisit the Diamond-Dybvig model of liquidity insurance in the presence of hidden trades. The key result is that in this environment deposit-taking banks are not necessary for the efficient provision of liquidity. Mutual funds are constrained efficient when supplemented with the same...

Given the indisputable cost of policy inaction in the run-up to banking crises as well as the negative side effects of unwarranted policy activation, policymakers would strongly benefit from earlywarning thresholds that more accurately predict crises and produce fewer false alarms. This paper...

This paper documents how traditional and shadow banks interacted with one another during the 2007 financial crisis, when both assets and liabilities flew from shadow to traditional banks. To rationalize their behavior, we propose a simple model which demonstrates the symbiotic coexistence and...

The purpose of the "counter-cyclical capital buffer" (buffer) is to dampen procyclicality in the financial system, absorb capital losses and prevent a credit crunch during recessions. In this paper, a stylized analytical expression for optimal buffer policy is presented. Results are derived...

Several countries now require banks or money market funds to impose state-contingent costs on shortterm creditors to absorb financial stress. We study these requirements as part of the broader prudential toolkit in a model with five key ingredients: banks may face an aggregate stress state with...

This paper explores the relationship between environmental protection and international capital movements, when tax policy is endogenous (through voting). A two-period general equilibrium model of a small open economy is specified to compare the effects of two different constitutions (commitment...