This paper presents a new theory that explains why it is beneficial for banks to be highly interconnected and to engage in herding behavior. It shows that these two important causes of systemic risk are interdependent and thus cannot be considered in isolation. The reason is that banks have an...

This paper presents a theory that explains why it is beneficial for banks to engage in circular lending activities on the interbank market. Using a simple network structure, it shows that if there is a non-zero bailout probability, banks can significantly increase the expected repayment of...

This paper explains why banks derive a benefit from being highly interconnected. We show that when banks are protected by government guarantees they can significantly increase their expected returns by channeling funds through the interbank market before these funds are invested in real assets....