Too Many to Fail - An Analysis of Time-Inconsistency in Bank Closure Policies

Bank of England Working Paper No. 319

London Business School IFA Working Paper

54 Pages Posted: 5 Mar 2005

See all articles by Viral V. Acharya

Viral V. Acharya

New York University (NYU) - Leonard N. Stern School of Business; New York University (NYU) - Department of Finance; Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR); European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI); National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

Tanju Yorulmazer

Koc University

Multiple version iconThere are 3 versions of this paper

Date Written: February 2007

Abstract

While the too-big-to-fail guarantee is explicitly a part of bank regulation in many countries, this paper shows that bank closure policies also suffer from an implicit too-many-to-fail problem: when the number of bank failures is large, the regulator finds it ex-post optimal to bail out some or all failed banks, whereas when the number of bank failures is small, failed banks can be acquired by the surviving banks. This gives banks incentives to herd and increases the risk that many banks may fail together. The ex-post optimal regulation may thus be time-inconsistent or sub-optimal from an ex-ante standpoint. In contrast to the too-big-to-fail problem which mainly affects large banks, we show that the too-many-to-fail problem affects small banks more by giving them stronger incentives to herd.

Keywords: Bank regulation, systemic risk, bailout, moral hazard, herding, too big to fail

JEL Classification: G21, G28, G38, E58, D62

Suggested Citation

Acharya, Viral V. and Acharya, Viral V. and Yorulmazer, Tanju, Too Many to Fail - An Analysis of Time-Inconsistency in Bank Closure Policies (February 2007). Bank of England Working Paper No. 319, London Business School IFA Working Paper, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=626242 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.626242

Viral V. Acharya (Contact Author)

New York University (NYU) - Leonard N. Stern School of Business ( email )

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HOME PAGE: http://www.stern.nyu.edu/~vacharya

New York University (NYU) - Department of Finance ( email )

Stern School of Business
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Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) ( email )

London
United Kingdom

European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI) ( email )

c/o the Royal Academies of Belgium
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Belgium

National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) ( email )

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Tanju Yorulmazer

Koc University ( email )

Rumeli Feneri Yolu
Sariyer, Istanbul, 34450
Turkey

HOME PAGE: http://gsssh.ku.edu.tr/en/departments/economics/akademik-kadro/show/tyorulmazer/

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