We review the theory of deposit insurance, highlighting the underlying assumptions that were not satisfied during the recent financial crisis and that may have led to serious policy mistakes. In theoretical models, deposit insurance is mostly seen as an equilibrium selection device to avoid...

Banks are intrinsically fragile because of their role as liquidity providers. This results in under-provision of liquidity. We analyze the effect of government guarantees on the interconnection between banks' liquidity creation and likelihood of runs in a model of global games, where banks.and...

Real options are valuable sources of flexibility that are either inherent in, or can be built into, corporate assets. The value of such options are generally not captured by the standard discounted cash flow (DCF) approach, but can be estimated using a variant of financial option pricing...

In these "extracts" from the world's best-selling graduate textbook, the authors offer a number of suggestions for practitioners, including: Copyright (c) 2008 Morgan Stanley.

Government guarantees to financial institutions are intended to reduce the likelihood of runs and bank failures, but are also usually associated with distortions in banks’ risk taking decisions. We build a model to analyze these trade-offs based on the global-games literature and its...

Banks are intrinsically fragile because of their role as liquidity providers. This results in under-provision of liquidity. We analyze the e¤ect of government guarantees on the interconnection between banks' liquidity creation and likelihood of runs in a model of global games, where banks.and...