This paper shows that liquidity regulation can trigger unintended credit booms in the presence of interbank market power. We consider a price setter and a continuum of price takers who trade reserves after the realization of idiosyncratic liquidity shocks. The price takers are endogenously less liquid and circumvent regulation by engaging in shadow banking, which leads to a reallocation of funding away from the more liquid price setter. This reallocation channel underlies the credit boom. Endogenous responses in bank liquidity ratios also affect the magnitude of the boom. We discuss extensions of the model and illustrate its quantitative performance with an application to China.

A large literature at the intersection of economics and finance offers prescriptions for regulating banks to increase financial stability.This literature abstracts from the discretion that accounting standards give banks over financial reporting, creating a gap between the information assumed to be available to regulators in models of optimal regulation and the information available to regulators in reality.We bridge insights from the economics, finance, and accounting literatures to synthesize knowledge about the design and implementation of bank regulation and identify areas where more work is needed.We present a simple framework for organizing the relevant ideas, namely the externalities that motivate bank regulation, the rationales for allowing accounting discretion, and the use of discretion to circumvent regulation.Our takeaway from reviewing work in these areas is that academic studies of bank regulation and accounting discretion require a more unified approach to design optimal policy for the real world.

The collapse of long-term lending relationships amplified the Great Depression. We demonstrate this by developing a new measure of lending relationships that can be calculated from widely available data at any level of aggregation. Our approach exploits differences in the responsiveness of loan rates to bank funding costs and is supported by historical evidence and theoretical arguments. The new measure reveals that the marginal impact of bank suspensions on economic activity was higher in more relationship-intensive areas, providing the first formal evidence that relationship lending propagated the real effects of banking sector distress in the early 1930s.