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Working Paper
Preventing Bank Runs
Diamond and Dybvig (1983) is commonly understood as providing a formal rationale for the existence of bank-run equilibria. It has never been clear, however, whether bank-run equilibria in this framework are a natural byproduct of the economic environment or an artifact of suboptimal contractual arrangements. In the class of direct mechanisms, Peck and Shell (2003) demonstrate that bank-run equilibria can exist under an optimal contractual arrangement. The difficulty of preventing runs within this class of mechanism is that banks cannot identify whether withdrawals are being driven by ...
Briefing
Central Bank Digital Currencies and Regulatory Alternatives: the Case for Stablecoins
Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) have been in the spotlight as the Federal Reserve and other central banks explore introducing them. At the same time, stablecoins are also growing in popularity, and many people including politicians and regulators have started discussing how to properly regulate their issuance and use. In this article, I discuss the question of whether a regulatory framework for stablecoins — where regulated banks can issue stablecoins backed 100 percent by deposits at the central bank — could serve as an alternative to issuing CBDCs.
Briefing
GameStop, AMC and the Self-Fulfilling Beliefs of Stock Buyers
The recent stock market gyrations of GameStop and AMC Entertainment illustrate that companies' fates can sometimes hinge on self-fulfilling beliefs. Pessimistic expectations can raise the specter of bankruptcy, while optimistic expectations can allow for survival and eventual success. We show how it is sometimes possible for small coalitions of buyers — such as those that formed on the online forum Reddit — to tip the balance in favor of an optimistic scenario. By doing so, a coalition can reap large profits and fundamentally improve a company's prospects.
Working Paper
Is Money Essential? An Experimental Approach
Working Paper
Financial Fragility and Over-the-Counter Markets
This paper studies the interaction between financial fragility and over-the-counter markets. In the model, the financial sector is composed of a large number of investors divided into different groups, which are interpreted as financial institutions, and a large number of dealers. Financial institutions and dealers trade assets in an over-the-counter market la Duffie et al. (2005) and Lagos and Rocheteau (2009). Investors are subject to privately observed preference shocks, and financial institutions use the balanced team mechanism, proposed by Athey and Segal (2013), to implement an ...
Briefing
Sovereign CDS Dealers as Market Stabilizers
Economists at the Richmond Fed analyze the role of dealer-provided liquidity in sovereign credit default swap markets. Using newly available data from the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation, they track the positions held by large dealers during crises in Ukraine, Venezuela, and Argentina. The researchers find that large dealers tended to increase their provision of insurance as risk increased during those episodes — a finding that is consistent with the notion that they tend to act as market stabilizers during times of turmoil.
Briefing
How Post-2008 Financial Regulations Impacted Corporate Bond Liquidity
We review empirical findings regarding the impact of post-2008 financial regulations on the liquidity of corporate bond markets in the U.S. We first show that traditional measures of market liquidity improved in recent years. At the same time, the cost of illiquidity also increased. We then discuss findings showing that — after the regulations were implemented — dealer capital commitment, trade frequency and size decreased, while dealer bid-ask spread increased. The increase in dealer bid-ask spread is compensated by a change in the composition of the liquidity provision. Liquidity is ...
Working Paper
Preventing bank runs
Diamond and Dybvig (1983) is commonly understood as providing a formal rationale for the existence of bank-run equilibria. It has never been clear, however, whether bank-run equilibria in this framework are a natural byproduct of the economic environment or an artifact of suboptimal contractual arrangements. In the class of direct mechanisms, Peck and Shell (2003) demonstrate that bank-run equilibria can exist under an optimal contractual arrangement. The difficulty of preventing runs within this class of mechanism is that banks cannot identify whether withdrawals are being driven by ...
Working Paper
The Cost of Information in the Blockchain: A Discussion of Routledge and Zetlin-Jones
The volatility of crypto currencies hinders their ability to be media of exchange or stores of value, leading to the implementation of exchange-rate pegs in an attempt to stabilize these currencies. This strategy has been used by crypto currencies such as US Dollar Tether, Steem Backed Dollar and TrueUSD; and was previously adopted in countries such as Brazil, Mexico and Argentina. However, an exchangerate peg is vulnerable to speculative attacks if it is not 100% backed by reserves, as discussed in Obstfeld (1996). Using insights from the bank-run literature, Routledge and Zetlin-Jones ...
Working Paper
Playing with Money
Experimental studies in monetary economics usually study infinite horizon models. Yet, the time constraints of the laboratory sessions in which these models are conducted create finite horizons that imply monetary equilibria cannot exist. Moreover, laboratory subjects do not treat the probabilistic termination rule typically used in a manner consistent with the discount factor that the rule is intended to replace. Thus, it is unclear whether these experiments evaluate subjects' use of money to ameliorate trading frictions as an equilibrium phenomenon, their inability to understand backward ...