In this paper we argue that if monetary policy has insufficient deflation, private agents have incentives to set up alternative payment systems like fractionally backed bank deposits, which pay interest on the means of payment. In a competitive environment with free entry, these alternative...

In this paper, we argue that the anticipation of bailouts creates incentives for banks to herd in the sense of making similar investments. This herding behavior makes bailouts more likely and potential crises more severe. Analyses of bailouts and moral hazard problems that focus exclusively on...

Inherent in the definition of Pareto efficiency is the idea that, in dynamic environments, an individual is indexed by the history of events up to his birth (rather than, as usual, the date of birth). Here, we explore the implications of this natural formulation. The set of Pareto efficient...

Banks are vulnerable to self-fulfilling panics because their liabilities (such as demand deposits and certificates of deposit) are short term and unconditional, and their assets (such as mortgages and business loans) are long term and illiquid. To prevent wider financial fallout from such...

Banks are prone to panic-induced runs due to their traditional structure of short-term, unconditional liabilities and long-term, illiquid assets. To avoid systemic crises caused by such panics, governments tend to bail out failing banks. Traditional banking systems thus impose external costs....

In this paper we show that interest rate rules lead to multiple equilibria when the central bank faces a limit to its ability to print money, or when private agents are limited in the amount of bonds that can be pledged to the central bank in exchange for money. Some of the equilibria are...

This paper develops new recursive, set based methods for studying repeated games with private monitoring. For any finite-state strategy profile, we find necessary and sufficient conditions for whether there exists a distribution over initial states such that the strategy, together with this...

This paper considers an optimal taxation environment where household income is private information, and the government randomly audits and punishes households found to be underreporting. We prove that the optimal mechanism derived using standard mechanism design techniques has a bad equilibrium...

This paper argues that both unequal opportunity and social mobility are necessary implications of an efficient societal arrangement when incentives must be provided. Copyright 2006, Wiley-Blackwell.