This paper studies the welfare implications of various government policies that have been used to prevent bank runs. The benchmark model suggests that a bank run is a business-cycle-state-related phenomenon and it leads to the failure of the risk-sharing mechanism provided by the banking sector. Extensions of the model show that a number of policy instruments, including the suspension of convertibility of deposits, the taxation on short-term deposits, reserve requirement and blanket guarantee, turn out to be inefficient. Instead, I propose that a limited-coverage deposit insurance scheme or capital requirements can be welfare-improving.

This paper investigates the impact of CDS trading on the development of the bond market in Asia. In general, CDS trading has lowered the cost of issuing bonds and enhanced the liquidity in the bond market. The positive impact is stronger for smaller firms, non-financial firms and those firms with higher liquidity in the CDS market. These empirical findings support the diversification and information hypotheses in the literature. Nevertheless, CDS trading has also introduced a new source of risk. There is strong evidence that, at the peak of the recent global financial crisis, those firms included in CDS indices faced higher bond yield spreads than those not included.