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Report
Who Can Tell Which Banks Will Fail?
We use the German Crisis of 1931, a key event of the Great Depression, to study how depositors behave during a bank run in the absence of deposit insurance. We find that deposits decline by around 20 percent during the run and that there is an equal outflow of retail and nonfinancial wholesale deposits from both ex-post failing and surviving banks. This implies that regular depositors are unable to identify failing banks. In contrast, the interbank market precisely identifies which banks will fail: the interbank market collapses for failing banks entirely but continues to function for ...
Journal Article
Stability of funding models: an analytical framework
With the recent financial crisis, many financial intermediaries experienced strains created by declining asset values and a loss of funding sources. In reviewing these stress events, one notices that some arrangements appear to have been more stable?that is, better able to withstand shocks to their asset values and/or funding sources?than others. Because the precise determinants of this stability are not well understood, gaining a better grasp of them is a critical task for market participants and policymakers as they try to design more resilient arrangements and improve financial regulation. ...
Discussion Paper
What Makes a Bank Stable? A Framework for Analysis
One of the major roles of banks and other financial intermediaries is to channel funds from savings into valuable projects. In doing so, banks engage in “liquidity and maturity transformation,” since they finance long-term, illiquid projects while funding themselves with short-term, liquid liabilities. By performing this important role, banks expose themselves to the risk of runs: If depositors or other short-term creditors worry about their claims, they may withdraw funds en masse and cause the bank to fail. The recent financial crisis once again highlighted the fragility associated with ...
Working Paper
Deposit Convexity, Monetary Policy and Financial Stability
In principle, bank deposits can be withdrawn on demand. In practice, depositors tend to maintain stable balances for long periods, allowing banks to fund long-dated assets. Nevertheless, the cost of deposit funding influences banks’ capacity for maturity transformation. Banks and researchers conventionally model the response of deposit interest rates to market interest rates as constant, implying that deposits have nearly constant duration. Contrary to this standard assumption, we show empirically that the “beta” of deposit rates to market rates increases as market rates rise, causing ...
Discussion Paper
Mitigating the Risk of Runs on Uninsured Deposits: the Minimum Balance at Risk
The incentives that drive bank runs have been well understood since the seminal work of Nobel laureates Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig (1983). When a bank is suspected to be insolvent, early withdrawers can get the full value of their deposits. If and when the bank runs out of funds, however, the bank cannot pay remaining depositors. As a result, all depositors have an incentive to run. The failures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank remind us that these incentives are still present for uninsured depositors, that is, those whose bank deposits are larger than deposit insurance ...
Journal Article
Literature review on the stability of funding models
Financial intermediaries have an important role as liquidity providers?they perform maturity and liquidity transformation by issuing liquid, short-term liabilities while holding illiquid, long-term assets. But there is an inherent fragility associated with this role. This article provides a review of the economics literature on the stability of banks and other financial intermediaries, with a policy-oriented focus on their funding models. Yorulmazer employs the standard framework used in the literature to examine the fragility of intermediaries that conduct maturity and liquidity ...
Working Paper
Explaining the Life Cycle of Bank-Sponsored Money Market Funds: An Application of the Regulatory Dialectic
In this paper, we present empirical evidence of the regulatory dialectic in the prime institutional money market fund (PI-MMF) industry. The “regulatory dialectic”, developed by Kane (1977, 1981), describes how banks and regulators react to each other. For decades, a cap on commercial deposit interest rates fueled dramatic growth in bank-sponsored PI-MMFs as a form of shadow banking. During the growth period, banks with more commercial deposits were more likely to enter the PI-MMF industry in an effort to keep their commercial customers in affiliated subsidiaries. However, the 2008 crisis ...
Report
Investor Attention to Bank Risk During the Spring 2023 Bank Run
We examine how investors’ perception of bank balance sheet risk evolved before and during the March-April 2023 bank run. To do so, we estimate the covariance (“beta”) of bank excess stock returns with returns on factors constructed from long-short portfolios sorted on shares of uninsured deposits and unrealized losses on securities. We find that the market’s perception of bank risk shifted in both the time series and the cross-section. From January 2022 to February 2023, both factor betas were mostly insignificant, but after the bank run started, they became positive and significant ...