Liquidity, moral hazard and bank crises

Abstract

Bank crises, by interrupting liquidity provision, have been viewed as resulting in welfare losses. In a model of banking with moral hazard, we show that second best bank contracts that improve on autarky ex-ante require costly crises to occur with positive probability at the interim stage. When bank payo¤s are partially appropriable, either directly via imposition of …nes or indirectly by the use of bank equity as a collateral, we argue that an appropriately designed ex-ante regime of policy intervention involving conditional monitoring can prevent bank crises.bank runs, contagion, moral hazard, liquidity, random, contracts, monitoring.