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Working Paper
Optimal Dynamic Capital Requirements and Implementable Capital Buffer Rules
We build a quantitatively relevant macroeconomic model with endogenous risk-taking. In our model, deposit insurance and limited liability can lead banks to make risky loans that are socially inefficient. This excessive risk-taking can be triggered by aggregate or sectoral shocks that reduce the return on safer loans. Excessive risk-taking can be avoided by raising bank capital requirements, but unnecessarily tight requirements lower welfare by limiting liquidity producing bank deposits. Consequently, optimal capital requirements are dynamic (or state contingent). We provide examples in which ...
Working Paper
A Static Capital Buffer is Hard To Beat
In a model with endogenous risk-taking, deposit insurance and limited liability may lead banks to make risky loans that are socially inefficient. Capital requirements can prevent excessive risk-taking at the cost of reducing liquidity-producing bank deposits. A policy that sets capital requirements just high enough to prevent excessive risktaking will move capital requirements pro-, counter-, or a-cyclically depending on the shock source. However, such a policy requires full knowledge of all the shocks hitting the economy and is not implementable. Simple rules that respond to cyclical ...
Working Paper
Cyclical Fluctuations, Financial Frictions, and Productivity Differences across Firms
Within narrowly defined industries, the most productive firms produce far more than the least productive from the same inputs, and this dispersion widens in downturns. We build a tractable representative-agent model in which financial frictions—adverse selection and moral hazard—make firms sort endogenously into lenders, strategic defaulters, and producers. As credit conditions vary, the resulting misallocation gives aggregate total factor productivity (TFP) an endogenous component that accounts for about 30 percent of the variance of TFP at business-cycle frequencies, a third of it from ...