Since July 2007, the developed countries faced the most serious and disruptive crisis after the 1929 Great Depression. As the crisis unfolded, policy authorities stepped in to support troubled financial institutions with large bailouts. This prevented a meltdown of the system, but at the cost of...

We develop a model of the joint capital structure decisions of banks and their borrowers. Strikingly high bank leverage emerges naturally from the interplay between two sets of forces. First, seniority and diversification reduce bank asset volatility by an order of magnitude relative to that of...

We study a market for funding real investment in which valuation creates information on which adverse selection can occur. Unlike in previous models, higher amounts of valuation are associated with lower market prices and so greater returns to valuation, and this strategic complementarity in the...

Never before has finance been regarded with the suspicion of these past three years. Yet money and credit are part of what enabled human beings to overcome the barbarism of immanence, the savagery of a life ruled by consumption for survival. The critical rethinking of finance involves the very...

This paper models and estimates ex ante safety-net benefits at a sample of large banks in US and Europe during 2003-2008. Our results suggest that difficult-to-fail and unwind (DFU) banks enjoyed substantially higher ex ante benefits than other institutions. Safety-net benefits prove...

Testimonio del profesor John C. Coffee, Jr., frente alComité de Banca, Vivienda y Asuntos Urbanos delSenado, Congreso de los Estados Unidos de América.

We analyze government interventions to alleviate debt overhang among banks. Interventions generate two types of rents. Informational rents arise from opportunistic participation based on private information while macroeconomic rents arise from free riding. Minimizing informational rents is a...

This paper empirically analyzes the determinants of banks' systemic importance. In constructing a measure on the systemic importance of financial institutions we find that size is a leading determinant. This confirms the usual "Too big to fail'' argument. Nevertheless, banks with size above a...

Why were some banks heavily affected by mortgage crises, while others barely? Why were some banking sectors dominated by “originate and distribute” model, while others were trading? Why did some banks decide not to follow the others, and preferred to stay traditional banks? How the models...

In this paper, using network tools, I analyse systemic impacts of liquidity shocks in interbank market in case of endogenous haircuts. Gai, Haldane and Kapadia (2011) introduce a benchmark for liquidity crisis following haircut shocks, and Gorton and Metrick (2010) reveal the evidence from...