We design a model with banks of unequal size operating subject to liquidity requirements in an imperfectly-competitive deposit market. We show that large banks have stronger incentives than small ones to lobby in order to relax the liquidity requirements unless they bear significantly higher lobbying costs. Therefore, lobbying magnifies asymmetries between banks. Furthermore, we establish that the organization of influence activities matters. An industry-wide bank association for lobbying to relax the liquidity requirements suffers from an internal conflict of interest and cannot simultaneously benefit both large and small banks if these have identical lobbying cost functions.

We use a model of mean-shifting investment technologies to study the relationship between market structure, risk taking and social welfare in lending markets. Introduction of loan market competition is shown to reduce lending rates and to generate higher investments without increasing the equilibrium bankruptcy risk of borrowers. Hence, there need not be a tradeoff between lending market competition and financial fragility. Such a tradeoff may not emerge either when banks compete by conditioning interest rates on investment volumes irrespectively of whether credit rationing takes place or not.

Abstract We design a compound real options model, which determines the timing of takeovers and characterizes the distribution of the associated surplus. We delineate a relation between the bargaining power of the acquiring firm and the takeover incentives. The takeover threshold is decreasing as a function of the expected primary takeover gain and the embedded divestment gain. Decreased implementation uncertainty stimulates takeover activity. This uncertainty concerns the delay until either primary takeover synergies or subsequent divestment gains are realized. We demonstrate how the relation between volatility and takeover timing depends on the functional form of the profit flow with implementation uncertainty.

The paper constructs an overlapping generations model to evaluate how different bank rescue plans affect banks’ risk-taking incentives. For a non-competitive banking industry, we find bailout with tax imposed on the old generation or equity bail-in to be efficient policies in the sense that they implement socially optimal risk-taking. In a competitive banking sector, no-bailout implements the socially-optimal risk-taking. Bailout policies financed by a tax imposed on the young generation always induce excessive risk-taking.

We explore the inter-temporal effects of the pool externalities caused by imperfect screening in competitive credit markets. We find that imperfect screening may, depending on the parameters of the model, generate excessive screening, inefficient duplication of screening or screening cycles. Whenever screening cycles occur they are manifestations of either socially excessive or insufficient screening. We present a full equilibrium characterization and a welfare analysis. The implementation of socially optimal lending decisions requires communication across lenders (i.e. information sharing), which decentralized markets typically cannot achieve.

We characterize the profit-maximizing reserves of a commercial bank, and the generated probability of a liquidity crisis, as a function of the penalty imposed by the Central Bank, the probability of depositors' liquidity needs, and the return on outside investment opportunities. We demonstrate that banks do not fully internalize the social cost associated with the bail-out policy if the liquidity needs of individuals are correlated, and that competitive interbank markets will induce banks to raise their reserves under reasonable conditions. The marginal benefits from an interbank market decrease as the correlation between the liquidity shocks of banks increases.

Deposit insurance designs in many countries place a limit on the coverage of deposits in each bank. However, no limits are placed on the number of accounts held with different banks. Therefore, under limited deposit insurance, some consumers open accounts with different banks to achieve higher or full deposit insurance coverage. We compare three regimes of deposit insurance: no deposit insurance, unlimited deposit insurance, and limited deposit insurance. We show that limited deposit insurance weakens competition among banks and reduces total welfare relative to no or unlimited deposit insurance.