money and capital abstract the effects of money anticipated inflation on capital formation is a classic issue in macroeconomics previous papers adopt reduced form approaches putting money in the utility function or imposing cash in advance but using otherwise frictionless models we follow instead a literature that tries to be explicit about the frictions making money essential this introduces new elements including a two sector structure with centralized and decentralized markets stochastic trading opportunities and bargaining these elements matter quantitatively and numerical results differ from findings in the reduced form literature the analysis also reduces a gap between microfounded monetary economics and mainstream macro

bank runs liquidity costs and investment distortions abstract in this paper we extend the diamond and dybvig 1983 model of intermediation to study further the conditions under which bank runs can occur and to consider how private parties might adjust to the existence of bank run equilibria we provide weaker necessary conditions for runs we then characterize how banks respond to the possibility of runs in their design of deposit contracts and investment decisions banks might choose to offer contracts that prevent runs but under some conditions the second best contracts will involve accepting some risk of runs in order to achieve higher expected returns from their investments

do conditional cash transfers for schooling generate lasting benefits a five year followup of progresa oportunidades conditional cash transfer cct programs link public transfers to human capital investment in hopes of alleviating current poverty and reducing its intergenerational transmission however little is known about their long term impacts this paper evaluates longer run impacts on schooling and work of the best known cct program mexico s progresa oportunidades using experimental and nonexperimental estimators based on groups with different program exposure the results show positive impacts on schooling reductions in work for younger youth consistent with postponing labor force entry increases in work for older girls and shifts from agricultural to nonagricultural employment the evidence suggests schooling effects are robust with time

bank runs and investment decisions revisited we examine how the possibility of a bank run affects the deposit contract offered and the investment decisions made by a competitive bank cooper and ross 1998 have shown that when the probability of a run is small the bank will offer a contract that admits a bank run equilibrium we show that in this case the bank will chose to hold an amount of liquid reserves exactly equal to what withdrawal demand will be if a run does not occur in other words precautionary or excess liquidity will not be held this result allows us to determine how the possibility of a bank run affects the level of illiquid investment chosen by a bank we show that when the cost of liquidating investment early is high the level of investment is decreasing in the probability of a run however when liquidation costs are moderate the level of investment is actually increasing in the probability of a run

the marginal cost of public funds and tax reform in africa abstract in this paper we propose estimates of the marginal cost of public funds mcf in 38 african countries we develop a simple general equilibrium model that can handle taxes on five major tax classes and can be calibrated with little more than national accounts data a key feature of our model is the explicit recognition of the informal economy our base case estimate of the average mcf from marginal increases in all five tax instruments is 1 2 focusing on the lowest cost tax instruments in each country commonly the vat but not always the average mcf is 1 1 finally extending the tax base to include sections of the informal economy by removing some tax exemptions offers the potential for a low mcf source of public funds and a lowering of mcfs on other tax instruments

choosy search and the mismatch of talents this article proposes a multi sector matching model where workers have symmetric sector specific skills and the search market is segmented by sector workers choose the range of markets they are willing to participate in i identify a composition externality workers do not take into account the impact of their choice on sector specific mean productivity among the pools of job seekers consequently workers prospect too many market segments and there is room for public policy even when the so called hosios condition holds

regulating banks through market discipline a survey of the issues abstract the interest in the application of market discipline to regulate the financial industry has boomed recently due to the proposed new capital accord this paper reviews the potential role market discipline can play in financial regulation we start with a discussion of the rationale for financial regulation and with a brief history of the current regulatory mechanisms next a definition of market discipline as a regulatory mechanism is advanced we evaluate the disciplining power various market participants have finally we argue that more external risk management disclosure is a condition sine qua non in order to enable market discipline as a regulatory mechanism in this respect the basle committee has taken the right approach

bank liquidity and stability in an overlapping generations model in an infinitely repeated version of the diamond and dybvig 1983 model intergenerational transfers enable a bank to achieve interest rate smoothing and to provide depositors with liquidity insurance without diamond and dybvig s assumption of no side trades the bank is subject to runs that may result from either excessive withdrawals or the lack of new deposits the latter cause which cannot occur in diamond and dybvig s one generation model implies that suspension of convertibility may not prevent bank runs government intervention may be necessary to maintain bank stability article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

models of banking instability a partial review of the literature abstract this paper critically examines the theoretical literature on banking instability that has followed diamond and dybvig 1983 it explores the extent to which it a explains banking instability within a theoretical context in which financial intermediaries improve on unintermediated markets and b justifies government involvement in the financial intermediation industry it suggests that the literature has yet to provide a satisfactory theoretical basis for banking instability as such since the intermediaries which arise from it are peculiar mutual funds that bear little resemblance to real world banks in addition the paper challenges the widespread belief that this literature provides a sound foundation for government involvement in the industry it suggests that arguments for government intervention are open to objection on various grounds the most important one being that they are inconsistent with the existence of properly motivated financial intermediation in these models

reconciling bagehot and the fed s response to september 11 bagehot 1873 states that to prevent bank panics a central bank should provide liquidity at a very high rate of interest in contrast most of the theoretical literature on liquidity provision suggests that central banks should lend at an interest rate of zero this is broadly consistent with the federal reserve s behavior in the days following september 11 2001 this paper shows that both policies can be reconciled with commodity money as in bagehot s time liquidity is scarce and a high price allows banks to self select in contrast the fed has a virtually unlimited ability to temporarily expand the money supply so self selection is unnecessary

banking as the provision of liquidity this article represents a model economy in which demand deposits represent the optimal financial intermediation because these demand deposits are backed in part by an illiquid asset the in termediary bank is subject to panics in which each agent ration ally decides to withdraw his deposits making all worse off banks ca n prevent panics only through a distortion of the optimal contract t he government can prevent panics without this distortion by guarantee ing the return from deposits the moral hazard introduced by this dep osit insurance induces the government to regulate the intermediary s portfolio and returns copyright 1988 by the university of chicago

the cost of poverty alleviation transfer programs a comparative analysis of three programs in latin america summary a common criticism of antipoverty programs is that the high share of administrative nontransfer costs substantially reduces their effectiveness yet there is surprisingly little rigorous empirical evidence on program costs improved information and a better understanding of the costs of such programs are crucial for effective policymaking this study proposes and implements a replicable methodology for a comparative cost analysis of three similar poverty alleviation programs in latin america and assesses their cost efficiency the findings underscore that any credible assessment of cost efficiency requires a detailed analysis of program cost structures that goes well beyond simply providing aggregate cost information

money as the mechanism of exchange abstract the existence and use of money remained an embarrassing puzzle for monetary analysis we observe over man s history that social groups without generally accepted media of exchange exhibit poor survival characteristics most social groups do not use assets or commodities at random in the execution of exchanges one observes that a small subset of assets is dominantly used in transactions these transaction dominating assets are usually referred to as money the literature contains many suggestive attempts to explain the emergence and role of money the classic writers made passing references in somewhat pictorial language to the extension markets and increasing labor productivity induced by the use of a general medium of exchange this idea has never been systematically developed however karl brunner 1971

on analyzing the world distribution of income consideration of world inequality should cause reexamination of the key concepts underlying the welfare approach to measuring income inequality and its relation to measuring poverty this reexamination leads to exploration of a new measure that allows poverty and inequality to be considered in the same framework incorporates different approaches to measuring inequality and allows varied expressions of the cost of inequality applied to the world distribution of income for 1820 1992 the new measure provides different perspectives on the evolution of global inequality

how can safety nets contribute to economic growth the paper provides an up to date and selective review of the literature on how social safety nets contribute to growth the evidence is carefully chosen to show how safety nets have the potential to overcome constraints on growth linked to market failures and is organized into 4 distinct pathways i encouraging asset accumulation by changing incentives and by addressing imperfections in financial markets caused by constraints in obtaining credit and from information asymmetries overcoming such failures helps households to invest into their human capital or productive assets ii failures in insurance markets especially in low income setting safety nets are assisting in managing risk both ex post and ex ante iii safety nets are overcoming failure to create assets and other local economy complementary factors to household level investments iv safety nets are shown to relax political constraints on policy safety nets have a dual objective of directly alleviating poverty through transfers to the poor and of triggering higher growth for the poor however the trade off between the dual objectives of equity and growth is not eliminated by the potential for productive safety nets this remains critical for designing social policies

a search theoretic approach to monetary economics the essential function of money is its role as a medium of exchange the authors formalize this idea using a search theoretic equilibrium model of the exchange process that captures the double coincidence of wants problem with pure barter one advantage of the framework described here is that it is very tractable the authors also show that the model can be used to addre ss some substantive issues in monetary economics including the potenti al welfare enhancing role of money the interaction between specializat ion and monetary exchange and the possibility of equilibria with multip le fiat currencies copyright 1993 by american economic association

the distribution of money balances and the nonneutrality of money recent monetary models with explicit microfoundations are made tractable by assuming that agents have access to centralized markets after one round of decentralized trade given quasi linear preferences this makes the distribution of money degenerate which keeps the models simple but precludes the discussion of distributional effects of monetary policy we generalize these models by assuming two rounds of trade before agents can readjust their money holdings to study a range of new distributional effects analytically we show that unexpected symmetric lump sum money injections may increase short run output and welfare whereas asymmetric injections may increase long run output and welfare

unique equilibrium in a model of self fulfilling currency attacks even though self fulfilling currency attacks lead to multiple equilibria when fundamentals are common knowledge we demonstrate the uniqueness of equilibrium when speculators face a small amount of noise in their signals about the fundamentals this unique equilibrium depends not only on the fundamentals but also on financial variables such as the quantity of hot money in circulation and the costs of speculative trading in contrast to multiple equilibrium models our model allows analysis of policy proposals directed at curtailing currency attacks

existence of a monetary steady state in a matching model indivisible money abstract existence of a monetary steady state is established for a random matching model with divisible goods indivisible money an arbitrary bound on individual money holdings and take it or leave it offers by consumers the background environment is that in papers by shi and by trejos and wright the monetary steady state shown to exist has nice properties the value function defined on money holdings is strictly increasing and strictly concave and the measure over money holdings has full support

a divisible search model of fiat money this paper extends the kiyotaki wright search model of fiat money to allow for divisible money and goods the extension allows me to examine the standard issues in monetary economics such as the neutrality and superneutrality of money by severing the artificial link in the kiyotaki wright model between the money supply and the number of money holders it is shown that money is neutral but not superneutral money growth generates a trading opportunity effect it changes the fraction of different agents in the economy and hence changes the probability with which agents have a successful match in addition money growth has a negative effect on the real money balance that is familiar in walrasian monetary models the balance of the two effects can imply a positive optimal money growth rate

search bargaining money and prices the goal of this paper is to extend existing search theoretic models of fiat money which until now have assumed that the price level is exogenous by explicitly incorporating bilateral bargaining this allows us to determine the price level endogenously and leads to additional insights concerning the role of money for example we find that monetary equilibria are generally inefficient in the sense that output and prices differ from the solution to a social planner s problem although the difference can become small as the discount rate or search friction vanishes we also find that there exist nonstationary inflationary equilibria

an incentive approach to banking regulation we examine the optimal design of a risk adjusted deposit insurance scheme when the regulator has less information than the bank about the inherent risk of the bank s assets adverse selection and when the regulator is unable to monitor the extent to which bank resources are being directed away from normal operations toward activities that lower asset quality moral hazard under a socially optimal insurance scheme 1 asset quality is below the first best level 2 higher quality banks have larger asset bases and face lower capital adequacy requirements than lower quality banks and 3 the probability of failure is equated across banks perihaps t he most troubling aspect of the current deposit insurance system is the distortions caused by the pervasive use of an insurance premium that is independent of risk the undesirable incentives that result when such a system is employed in a world with imperfect information have long been recognized in the literature of particular concern is the incentive banks have to increase the risk of their portfolio in order to maximize the value of the deposit insurance provided in some respects this problem is similar to the incentives generated by corporate debt however the solution to this problem may be different in a banking context because the creditors include the deposit insurer who has the power to regulate the banks conceivably regulation may be able to mitigate the informational problem at hand in this paper we examine some of the tradeoffs that arise in the design of a regulatory system for banks

generalized search theoretic models of monetary exchange abstract virtually all simple search models of money assume agents with money cannot produce and so everyone has either 0 or 1 units of money in steady state we alternatively assume agents can always produce and simply restrict money inventories to 0 or 1 this seems better for many issues for example in the standard model it is difficult to interpret increases in the money supply because increasing the fraction of agents holding money decreases the economy s productive capacity our model avoids these problems and thus delivers more natural and simpler implications in many contexts we compare results on existence multiplicity and welfare across models

whither monetary economics i argue that monetary economics should be pursued by applying implementation theory to models which contain explicit frictions that make money essential the argument has two parts first i argue that models in which real balances are assumed to be productive models with money in utility or production functions or with cash in advance constraints contain hidden inconsistencies second i argue that the approach advocated is capable of providing new insights about some of the main issues in monetary economics the effects of monetary shocks the welfare cost of inflation and the roles of inside and outside money

toward a theory of international currency we use the framework of random matching games and develop a two country model of the world economy in which two national currencies compete and may be circulated as media of exchange there are multiple equilibria which differ in the areas of circulation of the two currencies in one equilibrium the two national currencies are circulated only locally in another one currency is circulated as an international currency there is also an equilibrium in which both currencies are accepted internationally we also find an equilibrium in which the two currencies are directly exchanged we first characterize the existence conditions of these equilibria in terms of the relative country size and the degree of economic integration and then use an evolutionary approach to equilibrium selection to explain the evolution of the international currency as the two economies become more integrated some welfare implications are also discussed for example a country can improve its national welfare by letting its own currency circulate internationally provided the domestic circulation is controlled for when the total supply is fixed however a resulting currency shortage may reduce the national welfare

money as a medium of exchange in an economy with artificially intelligent agents abstract we study the exchange economies of kiyotaki and wright 1989 in which agents must use a commodity or fiat money as a medium of exchange if trade is to occur our agents are artificially intelligent and are modeled as using classifier systems to make decisions in the assignment of credit within the classifier systems we introduce some innovations designed to study sequential decision problems in a multi agent environment for most economies that we have simulated trading and consumption patterns converge to a stationary nash equilibrium even if agents start with random rules in economies with multiple equilibria the only equilibrium that emerges in our simulations is the one in which goods with low storage costs play the role of medium of exchange i e the fundamental equilibrium of kiyotaki and wright

the contribution of increased equity to the estimated social benefits from a transfer program an illustration from progresa oportunidades most impact evaluations of conditional cash transfers ccts and unconditional cash transfers ucts focus on the returns to increased human capital investments that will be reaped largely or exclusively in the future e g when current children have increased productivities as adults but the objectives of these programs are not only to increase human capital investments with implications for future levels and distributions of income but also to alleviate current poverty and reduce current inequality the current distributional gains from such programs depend on the degree of inequality aversion in the social welfare function simulations show that for a range of inequality aversion parameters the welfare gains from current redistribution for the mexican progresa cct program can be as large or possibly much larger than the estimated present discounted value of future earnings from human capital investments in lower and upper secondary schooling these moreover are underestimates of the gains from redistribution because in addition to current gains such gains will be augmented in the future through the distribution of the returns on the human capital investments induced by cash transfer programs therefore to fully evaluate such programs it is critical to incorporate the distributional gains not only the impacts on human capital investments

on money as a medium of exchange we analyze economies in which individuals specialize in consumption and production and meet randomly over time in a way that implies that trade must be bilateral and quid pro quo nash equilibria in trading strategies are characterized certain goods emerge endogenously as media of exchange or commodity money depending both on their intrinsic properties and on extrinsic beliefs there are also equilibria with genuine fiat currency circulating as the general medium of exchange we find that equilibria are not generally pareto optimal and that introducing fiat currency into a commodity money economy may unambiguously improve welfare velocity acceptability and liquidity are discussed

the evolution of monetary equilibrium abstract the hahn problem is that even if a monetary equilibrium with valued fiat money exists in general equilibrium a nonmonetary equilibrium with a zero price on money generally also exists why should we expect the former over the latter here i consider the preferences that will survive repeated trading in an exchange economy where agents compete in biological fitness with unobservable preferences and positive assortativity in matching evolutionarily stable preferences implement the competitive equilibrium that maximizes the sum of agents fitnesses in a standard bewley townsend model this implies selection of the monetary over the nonmonetary equilibrium and also implies the survival of agents with money in the utility function trust in fiat money is only a recent development and even today such faith is hardly universal cass and shell 1980

evaluating transfer programmes within a general equilibrium framework we develop a general equilibrium model for evaluating domestically financed transfer programmes and derive analytical expressions which provide a framework for combining results from a computable general equilibrium model with disaggregated household data we separate the welfare impact into three components i e redistribution reallocative and distortionary effects we show how these are subsumed within one parameter the cost of public funds using a mexican programme for illustration we show that substantial welfare gains result from a switch from universal food subsidies to targeted transfers reflecting both the improved targeting efficiency of the latter and the relaxation the trade off between equity and efficiency when designing tax systems in an attempt to maximise the welfare impact of government transfers on lowincome households many governments in both developed and developing countries have moved towards better targeted transfer programmes in developed countries these transfers mostly take the form of cash transfers or tax credits whereas in developing countries they take the form of either cash transfers e g in latin america or infra marginal subsidised food rations e g in south asia l when evaluating the economic impact of such transfers it is useful to separate these into direct and indirect income or welfare effects the direct income effects reflect the design of the programme i e the rules for targeting transfers these are often referred to as first round effects and are captured by partial equilibrium approaches to policy evaluation the indirect effects capture the second round income changes brought about by the impact of cash transfers and their financing on the level and composition of demand and supply most evaluations of social safety net programmes focus on the partial equilibrium evaluation of programme targeting outcomes even those that focus on the indirect impacts tend to concentrate on their efficiency implications with only a very limited analysis of income distribution outcomes and with little attempt to combine both the equity and efficiency dimensions this is all the more limiting given that the central objective of these programmes is to improve income distribution in this paper we focus primarily on the indirect income effects in particular we show how the results from a computable general equilibrium model can be combined with the information available in standard household surveys to

a theory of a generally acceptable medium of exchange and barter abstract this paper develops a model that accounts both for the existence of money defined as a generally acceptable medium of exchange and for the survival of some barter exchange in economies in which money exists in contrast to jones 1976 seminal article in which individuals are restricted to fix trading strategies before entering the market the present model assumes that individuals have conditional trading strategies that allow them to effect exchange according to the types of trades they encounter in the market the analysis shows how decentralized market forces generate money and lead to a unique level of monetization

existence of steady states with positive consumption in the kiyotaki wright model we prove the general existence of steady states with positive consumption in an n goods and fiat money version of the kiyotaki wright model by admitting mixed strategies we also show that there always exists a steady state in which everyone accepts a least costly to store object in particular if fiat money is one such object then there always exists a monetary steady state we also establish some other properties of steady states and comment on the relationship between steady states and incentive feasible allocations

sorting versus screening search frictions and competing mechanisms in a market where sellers compete by posting trading mechanisms we allow for a general search technology and show that its features crucially affect the equilibrium mechanism price posting prevails when meetings are rival i e when a meeting by one buyer reduces another buyer s meeting probability under price posting buyers reveal their type by sorting ex ante only if the meeting technology is sufficiently non rival price posting is not an equilibrium multiple buyer types then visit the same sellers who screen ex post through auctions

economic growth liquidity and bank runs abstract we construct an endogenous growth model in which bank runs occur with positive probability in equilibrium in this setting a bank run has a permanent effect on the levels of the capital stock and of output in addition the possibility of a run changes the portfolio choices of depositors and of banks and thereby affects the long run growth rate these facts imply that both the occurrence of a run and the mere possibility of runs in a given period have a large impact on all future periods a bank run in our model is triggered by sunspots and we consider two different equilibrium selection rules in the first a run occurs with a fixed exogenous probability while in the second the probability of a run is influenced by banks portfolio choices we show that when the choices of an individual bank affect the probability of a run on that bank the economy both grows faster and experiences fewer runs

does commodity money eliminate the indeterminacy of equilibrium abstract previous studies have shown that a random matching model with divisible fiat money and without constraint on agents money inventories possesses a continuum of stationary single price equilibria wallace j econom theory 81 1998 223 conjectures that the indeterminacy can be eliminated by the use of commodity money instead i find that in a similar random matching model with dividend yielding commodity money a continuum of stationary single price equilibria exists when the utility of dividend is not too high this result casts doubt on the conventional belief that the indeterminacy of monetary equilibrium is be caused only by the nominal nature of money

a unified framework for monetary theory and policy analysis search theoretic models of monetary exchange are based on explicit descriptions of the frictions that make money essential however tractable versions of these models typically make strong assumptions that render them ill suited for monetary policy analysis we propose a new framework based on explicit micro foundations within which macro policy can be studied the framework is analytically tractable and easily quantifiable we calibrate the model to standard observations and use it to measure the cost of inflation we find that going from 10 percent to 0 percent inflation is worth between 3 and 5 percent of consumption much higher than previous estimates

the equity productivity tradeoff public school resources in brazil abstract a governmental welfare function is specified to explore the equity productivity tradeoff in the allocation of governmental schooling resources the constrained maximization model is estimated for brazil using expected incomes in each geographical area as the outcome of interest and governmental resources for each area as the input the equity productivity tradeoff in brazillian governmental preferences is estimated to be considerable with a welfare curvature close neither to the utilitarian nor to the rawlsian extremes but close to the intermediate cobb douglas value this implies neutral rather than reinforcing or compensating behavior in the allocation of governmental resources with the result that the distribution of such resources across areas is more equal than is that of expected incomes

coordination in the use of money abstract fundamental models of money while explicit about the frictions that render money essential are silent on how agents actually coordinate in its use this paper studies this coordination problem providing an endogenous map between the primitives of the environment and the beliefs on the acceptability of money we show that an increase in the frequency of trade meetings besides its direct impact on payoffs facilitates coordination in particular for a large enough frequency of trade meetings agents always coordinate in the use of money

money and prices a model of search and bargaining abstract this paper makes commodities divisible and incorporates bargaining into the search theoretic model of money to determine the purchasing power of money or price it is shown that two monetary equilibria always coexist where fiat money is universally accepted the two equilibria differ in price output welfare and the velocity of money sunspot monetary equilibria exist in which money is universally accepted in all states of the economy multiplicity has novel implications on the effectiveness of currency substitution and exchange market intervention journal of economic literature classification numbers c78 e40

intertemporal coordination with delay options abstract this paper studies equilibrium selection in intertemporal coordination problems with delay options the risk dominant action of the underlying one shot game is selected when frictions are arbitrarily small larger frictions introduce real option effects in the model and inhibit coordination

why governments should invest more to educate girls abstract women and men often receive the same percentage increase in their wage rates with advances in schooling because these returns decline with more schooling the marginal returns for women will tend to exceed those for men especially in countries where women are much less educated the health and schooling of children are more closely related to their mother s education than father s more educated women work more hours in the market labor force broadening the tax base and thereby potentially reducing tax distortions these three conditions it is argued justify the disproportionate allocation of public expenditures toward women s education

financial intermediation in an overlapping generations model with transaction costs abstract 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 because agents only transact when they face liquidity needs in the absence of asset risk intermediaries match redemptions with deposits and dividends and never sell assets if the economy is subject to transaction costs the intermediated economy can sustain higher stationary investment and welfare we also find that dead weight transaction costs can increase welfare because it protects banks from interbank arbitrage and dampens the inherent cyclicality of market economies

a contribution to the pure theory of money abstract this article analyzes a general equilibrium model with search frictions and differentiated commodities because of the many differentiated commodities barter is difficult in that it requires a double coincidence of wants and this provides a medium of exchange role for fiat currency we prove the existence of equilibrium with valued fiat money and show it is robust to certain changes in the environment rate of return dominance liquidity and the welfare implications of fiat money are discussed

money is memory abstract this paper examines the sets of feasible allocations in a large class of economic environments in which commitment is impossible following myerson 8 the standard definition of feasibility is adapted to take account of the lack of commitment the environments feature either memory or money memory is defined as knowledge on the part of an agent of the full histories of all agents with whom he has had direct or indirect contact in the past money is defined as an object that does not enter utility or production functions and is available in fixed supply the main proposition is that any allocation that is feasible in an environment with money is also feasible in the same environment with memory depending on the environment the converse may or may not be true hence from a technological point of view money is equivalent to a primitive form of memory journal of economic literature classification numbers e40 c73 d82

bank runs deposit insurance and capital requirements diamond and dybvig provide a model of intermediation in which deposit insurance can avoid socially undesirable bank runs we extend the diamond dybvig model to evaluate the costs and benefits of deposit insurance in the presence of moral hazard by banks and monitoring by depositors we find that complete deposit insurance alone will not support the first best outcome depositors will not have adequate incentives for monitoring and banks will invest in excessively risky projects however an additional capital requirement for banks can restore the first best allocation

an experimental exploration of self fulfilling banking panics their occurrence persistence and prevention this article tests the possibility and the degree of persistence of self fulfilling banking panics through an experimental protocol panics are proved to be persistent phenomena that are difficult to prevent however it seems possible to curb them through a learning effect caused by a temporary but sufficient suspension of the deposit availability combined with a narrow banking solution which makes banks more liquid additionally panic prevention requires a full deposit coverage to be effective this suggests that the moral hazard issue should not be tackled through a lower deposit coverage especially in emerging countries banking systems where depositors are likely to lose confidence

liquidity a new monetarist perspective this essay surveys the new monetarist approach to liquidity work in this literature strives for empirical and policy relevance plus rigorous foundations questions include what is liquidity is money essential in achieving desirable outcomes which objects can or should serve in this capacity when can asset prices differ from fundamentals what are the functions of commitment and collateral in credit markets how does money interact with credit and intermediation what can and should monetary policy do the research summarized emphasizes the micro structure of frictional transactions and studies how institutions like monetary exchange credit arrangements or intermediation facilitate the exchange process

bailouts and financial fragility how does the belief that policymakers will bail out investors in the event of a crisis affect the allocation of resources and the stability of the financial system i study this question in a model of financial intermediation with limited commitment when a crisis occurs the efficient policy response is to use public resources to augment the private consumption of those investors facing losses the anticipation of such a bailout distorts ex ante incentives leading intermediaries to choose arrangements with excessive illiquidity and thereby increasing financial fragility prohibiting bailouts is not necessarily desirable however it induces intermediaries to become too liquid from a social point of view and may in addition leave the economy more susceptible to a crisis a policy of taxing short term liabilities in contrast can correct the incentive problem while improving financial stability