An interbank market lets participants pool the risk arising from the combination of illiquid investments and random withdrawals by depositors. But it also creates the potential for one bank's failure to trigger off avalanches of further failures. We simulate a model of interbank lending to study the interplay of these two effects. We show that when banks are similar in size and exposure to risk, avalanche effects are small so that widening the interbank market leads to more stability. But as heterogeneity increases, avalanche effects become more important. By varying the heterogeneity and connectivity across banks, the system enters a critical regime with a power law distribution of avalanche sizes.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.