We develop a model of commodity money and use it to analyze the following two questions motivated by issues in monetary history: What are the conditions under which Gresham's Law holds? And, what are the mechanics of a debasement (lowering the metallic content of coins)? The model contains light...

BankCaR is a credit risk model that forecasts the distribution of a commercial bank's charge-offs. The distribution depends only on systematic factors; BankCaR takes each bank and projects its expected charge-off across a distribution of good years and bad years. Since most bank failures occur...

This paper studies bank capital regulation under deposit insurance when bank attributes and actions are private information. Banks are heterogeneous in quality and choose both the mean and variance of their investment strategy. Regulatory tools include capital regulation and state-contingent...

We develop a dynamic general equilibrium model of capital accumulation where credit is intermediated by banks operating in a Cournot oligopoly. The number of banks affects capital accumulation through two channels. First, it affects the quantity of credit available to entrepreneurs. Second, it...

This study examines the level of unsecured borrowing done by the firms that would ultimately rescue Long-Term Capital Management in the days leading up to the hedge fund's rescue. Although there is some evidence that these banks borrowed less at the height of the crisis, further examination...

A moral hazard model with exogenous bank franchise value is used to analyze bank capital regulation. Banks choose their capital structure as well as the riskiness and mean of their portfolio. The portfolio mean is determined by the level of costly screening. Screening and portfolio risk are...

This paper focuses on the interaction between regulation and competition in an industrial organisation model. We analyze how capital requirements affect the profitability of two banks that compete as Cournot duopolists on a market for loans. Bank management of both banks choose optimal levels of...

This paper provides an economic explanation for the extraordinary and historically unprecedented accumulation of liquid assets by the banking system in the aftermath of the Great Depression. At the end of the decade (1938 to 1939) the banking system held over 35 percent of their assets in...