IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/cesifo/v59y2013i4p609-627.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Preventing Banking Crises--with Private Insurance?

Author

Listed:
  • Hans Gersbach

Abstract

In this article, we review the functioning of private insurance against banking crises and identify its potential. The essential idea is that banks are recapitalized by private investors when negative events would otherwise cause a write-down of capital--or even bank insolvency. There are two modes of private insurance: pure insurance contracts and contingent debt contracts. In the former, funding of banks and insurance are separated, whereas in the latter, debt holders provide insurance. We summarize the main insights regarding the potential and limits of private insurance. We also discuss how such crisis insurance could be strengthened through complementary regulatory measures. Finally, we outline the overall pecking order of buffers and insurance for banking systems. (JEL codes: D41, E4, G2) Copyright The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Ifo Institute, Munich. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com, Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Hans Gersbach, 2013. "Preventing Banking Crises--with Private Insurance?," CESifo Economic Studies, CESifo Group, vol. 59(4), pages 609-627, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:cesifo:v:59:y:2013:i:4:p:609-627
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/cesifo/ifs043
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Calomiris, Charles W. & Herring, Richard J., 2011. "Why and How to Design a Contingent Convetible Debt Requirement," Working Papers 11-41, University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School, Weiss Center.
    2. Gersbach, Hans, 2004. "Financial Intermediation with Contingent Contracts and Macroeconomic Risks," CEPR Discussion Papers 4735, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    3. Robert J. Shiller, 2003. "Social Security and Individual Accounts as Elements of Overall Risk-Sharing," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 93(2), pages 343-347, May.
    4. Hans Gersbach, 2008. "Banking with Contingent Contracts, Macroeconomic Risks, and Banking Crises," CER-ETH Economics working paper series 08/93, CER-ETH - Center of Economic Research (CER-ETH) at ETH Zurich.
    5. Douglas W. Diamond, 1984. "Financial Intermediation and Delegated Monitoring," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 51(3), pages 393-414.
    6. Hakenes, Hendrik & Schnabel, Isabel, 2010. "Banks without parachutes: Competitive effects of government bail-out policies," Journal of Financial Stability, Elsevier, vol. 6(3), pages 156-168, September.
    7. Alon Raviv, 2004. "Bank Stability and Market Discipline: Debt-for-Equity Swap versus Subordinated Notes," Finance 0408003, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    8. Sinn, Hans-Werner, 1982. "Kinked utility and the demand for human wealth and liability insurance," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 17(2), pages 149-162.
    9. Jeitschko, Thomas D. & Jeung, Shin Dong, 2005. "Incentives for risk-taking in banking - A unified approach," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 29(3), pages 759-777, March.
    10. Chichilnisky, Graciela & Wu, Ho-Mou, 2006. "General equilibrium with endogenous uncertainty and default," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 42(4-5), pages 499-524, August.
    11. Hans Gersbach & Volker Hahn, 2011. "Modeling Two Macro Policy Instruments - Interest Rates and Aggregate Capital Requirements," CESifo Working Paper Series 3598, CESifo.
    12. K. J. Arrow, 1964. "The Role of Securities in the Optimal Allocation of Risk-bearing," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 31(2), pages 91-96.
    13. Gersbach, Hans, 2009. "Private Insurance Against Systemic Crises?," CEPR Discussion Papers 7342, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    14. Gersbach, Hans, 2003. "The Optimal Capital Structure of an Economy," CEPR Discussion Papers 4016, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Aptus, Elias & Britz, Volker & Gersbach, Hans, 2014. "On the economics of crisis contracts," CFS Working Paper Series 453, Center for Financial Studies (CFS).
    2. Elias Aptus & Volker Britz & Hans Gersbach, 2020. "Crisis Contracts," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 70(1), pages 121-164, July.
    3. Philippe Oster, 2020. "Contingent Convertible bond literature review: making everything and nothing possible?," Journal of Banking Regulation, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 21(4), pages 343-381, December.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Edward Simpson Prescott, 2012. "Contingent capital: the trigger problem," Economic Quarterly, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, vol. 98(1Q), pages 33-50.
    2. Hans Gersbach & Volker Hahn, 2009. "Banking-on-the-Average Rules," CER-ETH Economics working paper series 09/107, CER-ETH - Center of Economic Research (CER-ETH) at ETH Zurich.
    3. Jeffrey M. Lacker, 1991. "Why is there debt?," Economic Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, vol. 77(Jul), pages 3-19.
    4. Delgado, J. & Salas, V. & Saurina, J., 2007. "Joint size and ownership specialization in bank lending," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 31(12), pages 3563-3583, December.
    5. Ricardo J Caballero, 2010. "Sudden Financial Arrest," IMF Economic Review, Palgrave Macmillan;International Monetary Fund, vol. 58(1), pages 6-36, August.
    6. Brichs Serra, Elisabet & Buch, Claudia M. & Nienaber, Thomas, 1997. "The role of banks: Evidence from Germany and the US," Kiel Working Papers 802, Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel).
    7. Allen, Franklin & Gale, Douglas, 1995. "A welfare comparison of intermediaries and financial markets in Germany and the US," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 39(2), pages 179-209, February.
    8. Hans Gersbach, 2008. "Banking with Contingent Contracts, Macroeconomic Risks, and Banking Crises," CER-ETH Economics working paper series 08/93, CER-ETH - Center of Economic Research (CER-ETH) at ETH Zurich.
    9. Nan Chen & Paul Glasserman & Behzad Nouri & Markus Pelger, 2013. "CoCos, Bail-In, and Tail Risk," Working Papers 13-01, Office of Financial Research, US Department of the Treasury.
    10. Chollete, Lorán, 2008. "The Propagation of Financial Extremes: An Application to Subprime Market Spillovers," Discussion Papers 2008/2, Norwegian School of Economics, Department of Business and Management Science.
    11. Avdjiev, Stefan & Bogdanova, Bilyana & Bolton, Patrick & Jiang, Wei & Kartasheva, Anastasia, 2020. "CoCo issuance and bank fragility," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 138(3), pages 593-613.
    12. Markus Buergi, 2013. "Pricing contingent convertibles: a general framework for application in practice," Financial Markets and Portfolio Management, Springer;Swiss Society for Financial Market Research, vol. 27(1), pages 31-63, March.
    13. Philip Bond & Robert M. Townsend, 1996. "Formal and informal financing in a Chicago neighborhood," Economic Perspectives, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, vol. 20(Jul), pages 3-27.
    14. Nili, Masoud & Rastad, Mahdi, 2007. "Addressing the growth failure of the oil economies: The role of financial development," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 46(5), pages 726-740, February.
    15. Douglas Davis & Oleg Korenok & Edward Simpson Prescott, 2014. "An Experimental Analysis of Contingent Capital with Market‐Price Triggers," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 46(5), pages 999-1033, August.
    16. Papanikolaou, Nikolaos I., 2018. "To be bailed out or to be left to fail? A dynamic competing risks hazard analysis," Journal of Financial Stability, Elsevier, vol. 34(C), pages 61-85.
    17. Bernd Rudolph, 2010. "Die internationale Finanzkrise als Anstoß für Weiterentwicklungen im Risikocontrolling der Banken und für Reformen in der Bankregulierung," Schmalenbach Journal of Business Research, Springer, vol. 62(61), pages 122-149, January.
    18. Rustam Ibragimov & Dwight Jaffee & Johan Walden, 2018. "Equilibrium with Monoline and Multiline Structures [Uncertainty and the welfare economics of medical care]," Review of Finance, European Finance Association, vol. 22(2), pages 595-632.
    19. Gersbach, Hans, 2009. "Private Insurance Against Systemic Crises?," CEPR Discussion Papers 7342, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    20. Michael Sigmund & Kevin Zimmermann, 2021. "Determinants of Contingent Convertible Bond Coupon Rates of Banks: An Empirical Analysis (Michael Sigmund, Kevin Zimmermann)," Working Papers 236, Oesterreichische Nationalbank (Austrian Central Bank).

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D41 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure, Pricing, and Design - - - Perfect Competition
    • E4 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates
    • G2 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:cesifo:v:59:y:2013:i:4:p:609-627. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cesifde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.