The recent crisis was characterized by massive illiquidity. This paper reviews what we know and don't know about illiquidity and all its friends: market freezes, fire sales, contagion, and ultimately insolvencies and bailouts. It first explains why liquidity cannot easily be apprehended through...

The paper elicits a mechanism by which private leverage choices exhibit strategic complementarities through the reaction of monetary policy. When everyone engages in maturity transformation, authorities have little choice but facilitating refinancing. In turn, refusing to adopt a risky balance...

The recent unravelling of the Eurozone's financial integration raised concerns about feedback loops between sovereign and banking insolvency. The paper provides a theory of the feed backloop that allows for both domestic bailouts of the banking system and sovereign debt forgiveness by...

Traditional banking is built on four pillars: SME lending, access to public liquidity, deposit insurance, and prudential supervision. This paper unveils the logic of the quadrilogy by putting core services to "special depositors and borrowers" at the heart of the analysis, and makes room for...

This paper analyzes how private decisions and public policies are shaped by personal and societal preferences (values), material or other explicit incentives (laws) and social sanctions or rewards (norms). It first examines how honor, stigma and social norms arise from individuals' behaviors and...