Should policy makers be prevented from bailing out investors in the event of a crisis? I study this question in a model of financial intermediation with limited commitment. When a crisis occurs, the policy maker will respond by using public resources to augment the private consumption of those...

I revisit the Diamond-Dybvig model of liquidity insurance in the presence of hidden trades. The key result is that in this environment deposit-taking banks are not necessary for the efficient provision of liquidity. Mutual funds are constrained efficient when supplemented with the same...

In the wake of the global financial crisis that erupted in 2008, there has been extensive commentary and regulatory focus on the 'Too Big to Fail' issue. In this paper, we survey the proposed solutions and regulatory initiatives that have been undertaken. We conduct a longitudinal analysis of...

The paper models the interaction between risk taking in the financial sector and central bank policy. It shows that in the absence of central bank intervention, the incentive of financial intermediaries to free ride on liquidity in good states may result in excessively low liquidity in bad...

We conduct a laboratory experiment to examine under which circumstances a depositor-run at one bank may lead to a depositor-run at another bank. We implement two-person coordination games which capture the essence of the Diamond-Dybvig (1983) bank-run model. Subjects in the roles of followers...

Does demand for safety create instability ? Secured (repo) funding can be made so safe that it never runs, but shifts risk to unsecured creditors. We show that this triggers more frequent runs by unsecured creditors, even in the absence of fundamental risk. This effect is separate from the...

Prior to the Great Depression, regulators imposed double liability on bank shareholders to ensure financial stability and protect depositors. Under double liability, shareholders of failing banks lost their initial investment and had to pay up to the par value of the stock in order to compensate...

Banking models in the tradition of Diamond and Dybvig (1983) rely on sequential service to explain belief-driven runs. But the run-like phenomena witnessed during the financial crisis of 2007-08 occurred in the wholesale shadow banking sector where sequential service is largely absent,...

We use high-frequency interbank payments data to trace deposit flows in March 2023 and identify twenty-two banks that suffered a run - significantly more than the two that failed but fewer than the number that experienced large negative stock returns. The runs were driven by large...