In this paper we show that a deposit insurance can increase the probability of systematic banking crisis, even though it is optimally designed and does not induce any moral hazard. This is driven by the possibility of contagious bank runs. We prove that contagion only occurs if the correlation...

Traditional economic models have had difficulty explaining the non-monotonic real effects of credit booms and, in particular, why they have predictable negative after-effects for up to a decade. We provide a systematic transmission mechanism by focusing on the flows of resources between...

In response to the COVID-19 shock, many central banks in emerging market economies have launched local currency bond purchase programmes to address bond market dislocations, signalling that they were willing to take the role of a buyer of last resort. Local currency bond yields fell...

In the aftermath of the recent financial crisis, the federal government has pursued significant regulatory reforms, including proposals to measure and monitor systemic risk. However, there is much debate about how this might be accomplished quantitatively and objectively—or whether this is...

We show that for many classes of symmetric two-player games, the simple decision rule "imitate-the-best" can hardly be beaten by any other decision rule. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for imitation to be unbeatable and show that it can only be beaten by much in games that are of...

It is well known that the rock-paper-scissors game has no pure saddle point. We show that this holds more generally: A symmetric two-player zero-sum game has a pure saddle point if and only if it is not a generalized rock-paper-scissors game. Moreover, we show that every finite symmetric...

Robo-advisors are novel tools in financial markets that provide investors with low-cost financial advice, usually based on individual characteristics like risk attitudes. In a portfolio choice experiment running over 10 weeks, we study how much investors benefit from robo advice. We also study...

Two partners try to dissolve a partnership that owns an asset of ambiguous value, where the value is determined ex post by a draw from an Ellsberg urn. In a within-subject experiment, subjects make decisions in three different bargaining mechanisms: unstructured bargaining, the Texas shoot-out,...