We analyze an overlapping generations economy where agents interact to share liquidity risk. We show that a pure exchange economy has excessive trade in equilibrium because agents interact to rebalance their portfolios. Intergenerational financial intermediaries reduce the number of interactions...

Intervention has taken different forms in different countries and periods of time. Moreover, recent episodes showed that in front of an imminent crisis, the promise of no interventions made by governments is barely credible. In this paper we address the problem of resolving banking crises from...

This paper analyzes market discipline in a many-bank economy where contagion and bank runs interact. We present a model with differently-informed depositors, where those depositors that are more informed have incentives to monitor banks’ investments. It is shown that when banks are...

We survey the extant theories on why banks promise to pay par on demand and examine historical evidence on the conditions under which banks have promised to pay the par value of deposits and banknotes on demand when holding only fractional reserves. The theoretical literature can be broadly...

This paper presents a model consistent with the business cycle view of the origins of banking panics. As in Allen and Gale (1998), bank runs arise endogenously as a consequence of the standard deposit contract in a world with aggregate uncertainty about asset returns. The purpose of the paper is...

This paper incorporates costly voluntary acquisition of information à la Nikitin and Smith (2007) [Nikitin, M., Smith, R.T., 2007. Information acquisition, coordination, and fundamentals in a financial crisis. Journal of Banking and Finance, in press, doi:10.1016/j.jbankfin.2007.04.031], in a...