The Financial and Macroeconomic Implications of Banking Frictions and Banking Riskiness

This paper develops a model of banking frictions and banking riskiness, the importance of which is highlighted by the recent Global Financial Crisis (GFC). We propose a model-based approach to decompose the effect of a banking riskiness shock into a pure default effect and a risk effect when risk sharing among the depositors is imperfect. Although the default effect is quantitatively more important, the risk effect is not to be neglected. When the shock generates a bank spread similar in value to the peak during the GFC, the overall effect is a decline in employment by 6:57 percent. The pure default effect leads to a 4:76 percent employment decline by a “within-model” measure, and a 5:05 decline by a “between-model” measure. The remaining is attributed to the risk effect.