Optimal Regulation of a Fully Insured Deposit Banking System

We analyze risk sensitive incentive compatible deposit insurance in the presence of private information when the market value of deposit insurance can be determined using Merton's (1977, 3-11) formula. We show that, under the assumption that transferring funds from taxpayers to financial institutions has a social cost, the optimal regulation combines different levels of capital requirements combined with decreasing premia on deposit insurance. On the other hand, it is never efficient to require the banks to hold riskless assets. Finally, chartering banks is necessary in order to decrease the cost of asymmetric information.     

Conflicts of interest,information provision,and competition in the financial services industry

In some markets sellers have better information than buyers over which products best serve a buyer's needs. Depending on the market structure, this may lead to conflicts of interest in the provision of information by sellers. This paper studies this issue in the market for financial services. The analysis presents a new model of competition between banks, where price competition influences the ensuing incentives for truthful information revelation. We also compare conflicts of interest in two different firm structures, specialized banking and one-stop banking.     

Anonymous yes–no voting with abstention and multiple levels of approval

Symmetric (3,2) simple games serve as models for anonymous voting systems in which each voter may vote “yes,” abstain, or vote “no,” the outcome is “yes” or “no,” and all voters play interchangeable roles. The extension to symmetric (j,2) simple games, in which each voter chooses from among j ordered levels of approval, also models some natural decision rules, such as pass–fail grading systems. Each such game is determined by the set of (anonymous) minimal winning profiles. This makes it possible to count the possible systems, and the counts suggest some interesting patterns. In the (3,2) case, the approach yields a version of May's Theorem, classifying all possible anonymous voting rules with abstention in terms of quota functions. In contrast to the situation for ordinary simple games these results reveal that the class of simple games with 3 or more levels of approval remains large and varied, even after the imposition of symmetry.     

A cardinal approach to straightforward probabilistic mechanisms

In every probabilistic mechanism, society selects an alternative, through a random device, out of a subset of indifferent alternatives. Consequently, in this context individuals face uncertainty and value the different lotteries on alternatives by their expected utility, so that they make use of a Von Neumann-Morgenstern cardinal utility function. Surprisingly, the social choice approach to probabilistic mechanisms assumes the use of ballots which preclude the complete expression of behaviour towards risk: individuals can only announce their ordinal preferences, or an approximation of their cardinal preferences, since in any case only a finite number of representations of preferences is available. This paper attempts to study voting systems in which individuals can express the cardinality of their preferences by assigning weights to the alternatives. It is shown that by voting with ballots which reflect weighting a new class of straightforward probabilistic mechanisms is defined, and that this class strictly contains the class of probabilistic straightforward mechanism designed by Gibbard.     

Lender of Last Resort: What Have We Learned Since Bagehot?

The maintenance of financial stability is facilitated by well-designed safety-net arrangements aimed at limiting the risk of disruption in the financial system (crisis prevention) and the consequences of disruption if it arises (crisis management). An important element of crisis management is the lender of last resort (LOLR) function. This article reviews the main ideas on LOLR reflected in the academic literature, going back to Henry Thornton almost 200 years ago.     

Interbank Market Integration under Asymmetric Information

Cross-country bank lending appears to be subject to market imperfectionsleading to persistent interest rate differentials. In a modelwhere banks need to cope with liquidity shocks by borrowingor by liquidating assets, we study the scope for internationalinterbank market integration with unsecured lending when cross-countryinformation is noisy. We find that an equilibrium with integratedmarkets need not always exist, and that it may coexist withone characterized by segmentation. A repo market reduces interestrate spreads and improves upon the segmentation equilibrium.However, it may destroy the unsecured integrated equilibrium.     

Corporate Finance and the Monetary Transmission Mechanism

We analyze the transmission effects of monetary policy in ageneral equilibrium model of the financial sector, with banklending and securities markets. Bank lending is constrainedby capital adequacy requirements, and asymmetric informationadds a cost to outside bank equity capital. In our model, monetarypolicy does not affect bank lending through changes in bankliquidity; rather, it operates through changes in the spreadof bank loans over corporate bonds, which induce changes inthe aggregate composition of financing by firms, and in banks’equity-capital base. The model produces multiple equilibria,one of which displays all the features of a "credit crunch."     

Average cost pricing versus marginal cost pricing under moral hazard

This paper presents a general framework for analyzing shadow wages in LDCs. We focus on (i) the differences between the domestic and international prices, (ii) the equilibrating mechanisms in the economy, (iii) the endogeneity of earnings in industry and agriculture, (iv) the consequences of industrial employment creation on agriculture, and (v) the nature of migration and unemployment.We identify those reduced form relationships which are central in determining the shadow wage, and use them to obtain general formulae for the shadow wage. These formulae can be specialized to alternative technological, behavioral, and institutional settings. This yields many new results concerning the relationship between the shadow wage and the market wage. Also, earlier results on shadow wages are derived as special cases of our formulae.