The Federal Home Loan Bank (FHLB) System is a large, complex, and understudied government-sponsored liquidity facility that currently has more than $1 trillion in secured loans outstanding, mostly to commercial banks and thrifts. This paper first documents the significant role played by the FHLB...

We survey the theories of why banks promise to pay par on demand and examine evidence about the conditions under which banks have promised to pay the par value of deposits and banknotes on demand when holding only fractional reserves. The theoretical literature can be broadly divided into four...

Traditionally, aggregate liquidity shocks are modelled as exogenous events. Extending our previous work (Cao & Illing, 2007), this paper analyses the adequate policy response to endogenous systemic liquidity risk. We analyse the feedback between lender of last resort policy and incentives of...

We study differences in the price paid for liquidity across banks using price data at the individual bank level. Unique to this paper, we also have data on individual banks' reserve requirements and actual reserve holdings, thus allowing us to gauge the extent to which a bank is short or long...

The great depression of 1929 and the great financial crisis of 2008 have been the two big events of the last 75 years. Not only have they produced serious economic consequences but they also changed our view of economics and policymaking. The aim of this work is to compare these two great crises...

We develop a theoretical model of mortgage loss rates that evaluates their main underlying risk factors. Following the model, loss rates are positively influenced by the house price level, the loan-to-value of mortgages, interest rates, and the unemployment rate. They are negatively influenced...

In this paper we set up a New-Keynesian model with a heterogenous banking sector to analyze liquidity problems on the interbank market. The presence of an interbank market is essential to consider a situation where an increased liquidity supply by the central bank is only partially passed on to...

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, the ECB has experienced an unprecedented deterioration in the level of trust. This raises the question as to what factors determine trust in central banking. We use a unique cross-country dataset which includes a rich set of socio-economic...

We study money creation and destruction in today's monetary architecture and examine the impact of monetary policy and capital regulation in a general equilibrium setting. There are two types of money created and destructed: bank deposits, when banks grant loans to firms or to other banks and...

The importance of liquidity and insolvency for nation states and banks has been highlighted by current economic woes in the eurozone and elsewhere. The concepts are grounded in monetary theory, which determine the way they are interpreted. Connected to the discussion of autometallism and...