Essays on institutions for financial stability

This thesis includes three essays on the interaction between financial market institutions and market liquidity, and its implications for financial stability. The first essay studies an overlapping generations model of a risky asset market in which some agents face a participation cost. Market participation, by affecting the size of the pool of potential holders of the risky asset, determines the liquidity of the asset market. This essay studies how the frictions that are associated with capital requirements on financial institutions affect their incentives to supply liquidity to the market. The participation decision generates a positive and a negative externality, and the interaction between the two externalities can give rise to multiple equilibria in participation, i.e. to "liquidity cycles". The second essay studies the complementary problem of the optimal design of incentive systems for financial institutions in the context of limited market liquidity. In a contract between a borrower and a lender, financial incentives are provided by requiring the borrower to finance a sufficiently large share of her investment project. In the states of nature in which many projects are liquidated simultaneously, liquidation in private contracts is excessive relative to the efficient (second-best) contract chosen by a planner who internalizes the externality working through the liquidation price. This essay studies whether capital requirements on the borrowers can implement the second best allocation, and if not what kind of policy instruments can implement it.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Economics.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2002

Author dc:creator

• Benelli, Roberto, 1971-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Stephen A. Ross and Bengt Holmström.

• Economics.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/8406

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/8406