Deposit insurance schemes are becoming increasingly popular around the world and yet there is little understanding of how they should be designed and what their consequences are. In this Paper we provide a new rationale for the provision of deposit insurance. We analyse a model in which agents choose between depositing their funds with banks and placing them in a less productive self-managed project. Bankers have valuable but costly project management skills and the banking sector exhibits both adverse selection and moral hazard. Depositors do not fully account for the social benefits accruing from bank management of projects and therefore too few deposits are made in equilibrium. The regulator can correct this market failure by providing deposit insurance to encourage deposits. Contrary to received opinion, we find that deposit insurance should be funded not by bankers or depositors but through general taxation.
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Paper provided by C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers in its series CEPR Discussion Papers with number
4424.
Find related papers by JEL classification: D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information E42 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates - - - Monetary Sytsems; Standards; Regimes; Government and the Monetary System E58 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - Central Banks and Their Policies G21 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Banks; Other Depository Institutions; Mortgages G22 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Insurance; Insurance Companies
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