Market interest rates form an important part of the transmission mechanism of monetary policy. They also contain information about market expectations of future policy rates as well as attitudes to, and perceptions of, risk. Extracting and interpreting this policy-relevant information is not...

In this paper we show that deposit insurance can increase the probability of systemic banking crisis, even though it is optimally designed and its premium is risk related. This is driven by the possibility of contagious bank runs. We prove that contagion only occurs if the correlation between...