Should policy makers be permitted to intervene during a financial crisis by bailing out financial institutions and their investors? We study this question in a model that incorporates two competing views about the underlying causes of these crises: self-fulfilling shifts in investors'...

We use experimental methods to investigate what factors contribute to breakdowns in coordination among a bank's depositors. Subjects in our experiment decide whether to leave their money deposited in a bank or withdraw it early; a bank run occurs when there are too many early withdrawals. We...

We study the Green-Lin model of financial intermediation [E.J. Green, P. Lin, Implementing efficient allocations in a model of financial intermediation, J. Econ. Theory 109 (2003) 1-23] under a more general specification of the distribution of types across agents. We derive the efficient...

When policy makers have limited commitment power, self-fulfilling bank runs can arise as an equilibrium phenomenon. We study how such banking panics unfold in a version of the Diamond and Dybvig (1983) model. A run in this setting is necessarily partial, with only some depositors participating....