Crisis Resolution and Bank Liquidity

Viral Acharya, Hyun Song Shin and Tanju Yorulmazer

No 15567, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: What is the effect of financial crises and their resolution on banks' choice of liquid asset holdings? When risky assets have limited pledgeability and banks have relative expertise in employing risky assets, the market for these assets clears only at fire-sale prices following a large number of bank failures. The gains from acquiring assets at fire-sale prices make it attractive for banks to hold liquid assets. We show that the resulting choice of bank liquidity is counter-cyclical, inefficiently low during economic booms but excessively high during crises, and present and discuss evidence consistent with these predictions. Since inefficient users may enter asset markets when prices fall sufficiently, interventions to resolve banking crises may be desirable ex post. However, policies aimed at resolving crises affect ex-ante bank liquidity in subtle ways: while liquidity support to failed banks or unconditional support to surviving banks in acquiring failed banks give banks incentives to hold less liquidity, support to surviving banks that is conditional on their liquid asset holdings creates incentives for banks to hold more liquidity.

JEL-codes: D62 E58 G21 G28 G38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban and nep-reg
Note: CF
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Published as Viral V. Acharya & Hyun Song Shin & Tanju Yorulmazer, 2011. "Crisis Resolution and Bank Liquidity," Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 24(6), pages 2166-2205.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w15567.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Crisis Resolution and Bank Liquidity (2011)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:15567

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w15567

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().